I tried it once, it's very opinionated and may not be suitable for what a lot of people think of when they're coming from something like Github. The required old-school patch-by-mail thing is a blocker for a lot of people.
I self-host Forgejo on a Docker container. Thinking about it, this is actually the right way to go.
If you got public projects, then something like Codeberg is in fact the place to go. If you got private projects, why push to someone's cloud-hosted git service at all? Push to your own service like Forgejo and sync backups to a local hard-drive or even online using rclone.
Because I don't mind paying github $4 or $7 and not worry about the admin burden.
Of course, this goes for simpler setups where you only use the git hosting part. Because to switch providers you only have to change the remote and push.
If you got yourself dependent on their other pipelines, it's more complicated.
Regarding Forgejo [0] there are a number of other open providers listed on the delightful forgejo [1] curated list. In addition there is a Professional services repository [2] where services are listed in the issue tracker.
Git is extremely easy to "self host". What makes things complicated are the web interfaces around code hosting, and all their supposedly important features. These days, Prs, issues, forums, wikis and all that seem to be synonymous with "git", which is pretty weird.
The PR model is pretty much universal for a reason. I get why it is considered out of scope for core git, but it is by no means a weird fixation people have.
Then you have to use email for the review conversation, make the discussion easily available to everyone involved and future devs, track manually which comment refers to which line of the diff due to lack of overlaying, manually ping to warn of updates, rely on manual quoting, no direct information on whether the CI pipeline succeeded...
To me that feels like writing code using only sed. It is possible, but it removes or makes convoluted an absurd degree of regular work.
You are correct, but integration with CI/CD and other services as a part of pull-request process in a modern platform is very convenient. I would not go back to e-mail. Especially since I can self host the whole platform like Gitea.
Because there isn't really a good name. In FOSS circles the name "code forge" is often used, and then OP might say "git-based code forge" instead. But both Github and Gitlab don't consider themself (and aren't) code forges. The term doesn't carry the load of the product positioning. So "hosting provider for git" is a pretty good description imho.
Which is ironic because PR is definitely alien to git. There is no such git concept as a PR, nor git pr command.
Coming from a pure git workflow in mailing lists where branches, and commits(and associated diff and git am metadata) are the unit of work, I struggled to adapt into the PR concept in the beginning.
I liked to work with gerrit, where the unit of the review is the commit. This also ensured a nice little history and curation of the change set. The commit in github is not even in the main tab of the PR. It is like it is a second thought. Even in the review, reviewing by commit is awkward and discouraged.
One of the other comments mentions https://codefloe.com. I haven't tested and haven't yet checked their background, but they seem to allow private repositories.
Change directory to your local git repository that you want to share with friends and colleagues and do a bare clone git clone --bare . /tmp/repo.git You just created a copy of the .git folder without all the checked out files.
Upload /tmp/repo.git to your linux server over ssh. Don't have one? Just order a tiny cloud server from Hetzner or another European provider. You can place your git repository anywhere, but the best way is to put it in a separate folder, e.g. /var/git. The command would look like with scp -r /tmp/repo.git me@server:/var/git/.
To share the repository with others, create a group, e.g. groupadd --users me git You will be able to add more users to the group with groupmod.
Your git repository is now writable only by me. To make it writable by the git group, you have to change the group on all files in the repository to git with chgrp -R git /var/repo.git and enable the group write bit on them with chmod -R g+w /var/repo.git.
This fixes the shared access for existing files. For new files, we have to make sure the group write bit is always on by changing UMASK from 022 to 002 in /etc/login.defs.
There is one more trick. For now on, all new files and folders in /var/git will be created with the user's primary group. We could change users to have git as the primary group.
But we can also force all new files and folders to be created with the parent folder's group and not user primary group. For that, set the group sticky bit on all folders in /var/git with find /var/git -type d -exec chmod g+s \{\} +
You are done.
Want to host your git repository online? Install caddy and point to /var/git with something like
Gitea is one of the easiest projects to to self-host. And to do regular upgrades, you only need to update one file. It has been a joy to self-host for many years now.
You are just a glitch in their system. They won't check the content of private repos, and they probably also do not check if there is free software hosted at the same account, so you might have found the hole in their good will.
But their limit seems around 100 MB storage-usage, so I guess it's within their abilities to tolerate some glitches.
Ah ok, well, save for some drafts I wouldn't mind opening the repo which is just a Hugo system intended for a public website anyway. But good to know. Perhaps I will self-host that forgejo instance then :)
