Obligatory check : are you sure you really need a forge? (that’s the name we use to designate tools like Github/Gitlab/Gitea/etc). You can do a lot with git alone : you can host repositories on your server, clone them through ssh (or even http with git http-backend, although it requires a bit of setup), push, pull, create branches, create notes, etc. And the best of it : you can even have CI/CD scripts as post-receive hooks that will run your tests, deploy your app, or reject the changes if something is not right.

The only thing you have to do is to create the repos on your server with the --bare flag, as in git init --bare, this will create a repos that is basically only what you usually have in the .git directory, and will avoid having errors because you pushed to a branch that is not the currently one checked. It will also keep the repos clean, without artifacts (provided you run your build tasks elsewhere, obviously), so it will make all your sources really easy to backup.

And to discuss issues and changes, there is always email. :) There is also this, a code review tool that just pop up on HN.

And it works with Github! :) Just add a git remote to Github, and you can push to it or fetch from it. You can even setup hooks to sync with it. I publish my FOSS projects both on Github and Gitlab, and the only thing I do to propagate changes is to push to my local bare repos that I use for easy backups, they each have a post-update hook which propagates the change everywhere it needs to be (on Github, Gitlab, various machines in my local network, which then have their own post-update hooks to deploy the app/lib). The final touch to that : having this ~/git/ directory that contains all my bare repos (which are only a few hundred MB so fit perfectly in my backups) allowed me to create a git_grep_all script to do code search in all my repos at once (who needs elasticsearch anyway :D ) :

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# grep recursively bare repos

INITIAL_DIR=$(pwd)
for dir in $(find . -name HEAD -exec dirname '{}' \;); do
  pushd $dir > /dev/null
  git grep "$*" HEAD > /dev/null
  if [[ "$?" = "0" ]]; then
    pwd
    git grep "$*" HEAD
    echo
  fi

  popd > /dev/null
done

(note that it uses pushd and popd, which are bash builtins, other shells should use other ways to change directories)

The reason why you may still want a forge is if you have non tech people who should be able to work on issues/epics/documentation/etc.

Have a look at Forgejo which is a soft fork run by a nonprofit organization of Gitea which is owned by a for-profit company.

https://forgejo.org/

It need very little system resources and still gives you all the common features you know from commercial Git hosting providers.

And yes, you can mirror existing Git repos using a web UI.

What? Gitea. Gitlab is a complete devops platform. Awesome, but complete overkill.

Why? Because I regularly commit code atrocities and have a hard enough time dealing with imposter syndrome, I don’t need to add public shaming on top of it (And just data sovereignty I guess)

I’m using GItea and it’s been working great. Very easy to set up in docker.

gitlab can be selfhosted

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What are you folks using to host your super secret local code and why?

This obviously doesn’t help for the rest of your question, but for anything that I don’t want to open source for whatever reason, I just make a bare repo and push it to a folder on my server that has all my bare repos. Literally just git server on my LAN. Nothing fancy. No UI or anything, but I don’t use a UI for git anyway.

If you don’t have a server at home, you could do the same thing but to a folder on your local machine. That obviously means you will have no backup. But you will still have version control in case you want to revert something you did or refer back to an old version.

GitLab or GitTea

I currently use GitLab, but if I were doing things from the start I’d go with Gitea or Forgejo since its lighter. Though I do quite like GitLab CI (which is why I didn’t go with the other initially) but these days I hear Gitea has Actions support built in.

Gitlab can do what you need

I personally use gitea but there is also a community version of gitlab that has way more power than I need.

Gitea can import a repo from GitHub but I don’t know whether it can also push updates out as one never tried to do that.

I picked gitea as I didn’t need all of the extra power of gitlab and they were the first two options I found. I don’t deploy it using portainer but all of my stacks are set up as git repos in portainer and using the webhook feature it’ll auto pull and redeploy whenever I push to it

Forgejo. Gitlab will be overkill probably.

Gogs and Gitea are git alternatives that offers GitLab features with less system resource demands.

Though, it would be good to understand your use case, whereby a GitHub private repository would not be suitable…

+1 For Gitea. Works really well for me. It recently added GitHub style actors so you can use GitHub style CI/CD too!

https://about.gitea.com/ is a great lightweight alternative that’s heavily inspired by GitHub.