I am looking for recommendations for an open source self-hosted version control system source code hosting service. I found a few, but I can’t decide on which one to pick:
If there’s a better one than the ones I’ve listed here, I’d love to hear about it!
I care primarily about privacy and security, if that makes any difference.
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Gogs is the original. Gitea is a fork because the dev of Gogs wasn’t taking community input (I think that was the reasoning behind it). Forgejo is a fork of gitea because some folks didn’t like gitea forming a for profit corporation (Or something to that effect).
As far as day to day use they’re all fairly similar, though it’s been a long time since I used Gogs.
It’s not just the for-profit corporation, there’s also governance issues. Basically, the community elected certain positions and then had the rug pulled out from them such that no elections would be held again.
In the name of the Gitea Community who elected you last year, we welcome the creation of a for-profit company that allows you to make a living out of Gitea.
[…]
We believed you when you promised to pass along the ownership of the Gitea project to your elected successors. This promise is part of an essential bond between you and the strong Community of volunteers, as well as all those who rely upon our collective efforts.
With that in mind, you can understand our surprise when we learned on October 25th, 2022 that both the domains and the trademark were transferred to a for-profit company without our knowledge or approval.
IMO, the Gogs dev was correct. If you look at that community input and what Gitea became, I was glad to use the version that rejected it.
But I don’t know how it compares with Forgejo.
what’s the problem with gitea? I never used gogs so I can’t compare it
The added features made it harder to deploy, came with some bugs, and overall traded a simple design for community-oriented features that IMO were a negative value overall.
made it harder to deploy? Isn’t it still just a single binary, a config file and a directory for data?
bugs are inevitable for evolving software.
which community oriented features do you mean? are they in the way, or is it just that you don’t need them?
The things you’re describing aren’t really version control systems themselves. Git is a version control system; these are an ecosystem of web-based tools surrounding that version control system.
I don’t know if there’s a good term for these.
kagis
Wikipedia calls them “forges”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)
In free and open-source software (FOSS) development communities, a forge is a web-based collaborative software platform for both developing and sharing computer applications.
For software developers it is an online service to host the tools they need to work and communicate with their coworkers. It provides a workflow to propose modifications and engage in discussions. The goal is to reach an agreement that will allow these modifications to be merged into the software repository.
For users, a forge is a repository of computer applications, a place where bugs can be reported, a channel to be informed of security issues, etc.
The source code itself is stored in a revision control system and linked to a wide range of services such as a code review, bug database, continuous integration, etc. When a development community forks, it duplicates the content of the forge and is then able to modify it without asking permission. A community may rely on services scattered on multiple forges: they are not necessarily hosted under the same domain.
I guess it would be more akin to a “source code hosting service,” but that would imply that I intend to open it to the internet (which isn’t necessarily the case).
Sorry for the off-topic question, but this has been driving me crazy.
Is “kagis” the verb for using the search engine “kagi”? For the longest time I’ve been interpreting it as a “dejected sigh” emotional expression.
Yes!
You’re missing GitLab. I’d be looking at GitLab or Forgejo.
But you might not need this. When you access a private Git repository, you’re normally connecting over SSH and authenticating using SSH keys. By default, if you have Git installed on a server you can SSH to and you have a Git repository on that server in a location you can access, you can use that server as a Git remote. You only really want one these services if you want the CI pipelines or collaboration tools.
Having a web UI is useful even if you’re not using the extra tools. Not mandatory of course, but nice.
My only input is gitlab is very complicated, never used the others
To install gitlab:
- Yum install omnibus-gitlab
Done.
Forgejo - actively developed open source. It’s what powers Codeberg. Easy to set up and manage with Docker. I moved to it from Gogs and skipped Gitea after reading about the forks.
Forgejo all the way
I use Forgejo for my private git repos but in all honesty, it’s massive overkill for my needs.
Used Gitea for a while, and decided to switch to Forgejo before the hard fork split (no more code from Gitea), been using it since, In my opinion both work well, but prefer Forgejo.
+1 for Forgejo here. It’s lightweight on resources compared to GitLab but still has all the features you’d need, plus the security/privacy focus aligns with your priorities. I’ve been running it on a small VPS for over a year and it’s been rock soild.
Not what you want probably but Tangled.sh
tightly-knit
social coding. tangled is new social-enabled git collaboration platform built on atproto. we envision a place where developers have complete ownership of their code, open source communities can freely self-govern and most importantly, coding can be social and fun again.
