this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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We are changing our system. We settled on git (but are open for alternatives) as long as we can selfhost it on our own machines.

Specs

Must have

  • hosted on promise
  • reliabile
  • unlikely to be discontinued in the next >5 years
  • for a group of at least 20 people

Plus

  • gui / windows integration
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[–] antonionardella 57 points 4 months ago (3 children)

I can vouch for Forgejo

https://forgejo.org/

Easy to set up, has a website GUI like Github/GitLab you can use git GUIs with it

https://codeberg.org runs on Forgejo

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Forgejo is leading the federated git initiative

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Just to give credit where credit is due, git federation is a Forgefed Initiative

Forgejo is implementing it in their platform.

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[–] swooosh 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Thank you! That would be my go to for my own projects as well. As far as I know they don't want company sponsorship. I am unsure about sustainability

[–] JASN_DE 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I am unsure about sustainability

In what regard?

[–] swooosh 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That the project will be developed in a year or two

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

Maybe check how long it is already going, so it can give you some confidence. Forgejo is a fork of gitea, which is a fork of gogs.

Also, codeberg, a nonprofit from Germany, is supporting development.

https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/what-is-codeberg/

The codebase history of Forgejo and its predecessors predates Codeberg. However, since 2022, Codeberg is backing the development of Forgejo as an umbrella organization.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

I’ve been looking at gitea because of its gitops capabilities that seem to be pretty much on par with github actions. Do you know if forgejo has something similar? There seems to be a lack of documentation in that area. This has been my only reason for not moving to forgejo but im hoping im wrong and just missed some documentation.

EDIT: Thank you all who provided some additional insights that I was missing. I'll take the leap and give forgejo a try!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

There are forejo runners and they seem compatible with a bunch of github actions. I created one that builds a docker image and publishes it on the repo.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Forgejo actions is basically GitHub actions. The difference in my ci scripts is a single line and you can even use GitHub action templates or whatever they're called.

You just need to add some runners to your server, which is pretty easily doable by just using some docker container and deploying that multiple times

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Forgejo actions is basically GitHub actions

That's the problem. GH actions su-huck.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 months ago (3 children)

I’m aware this is the selfhost community, but for a company of 20 engineers, it is probably best to use something commercial in the cloud.

Biggest pain point was for our ops guy, who constantly had to stay behind to perform upgrades and maintenance, as they couldn’t do it during business hours when the engineers are working. With a team of at least 20, scheduling downtimes could get increasingly more difficult.

It also adds an entire system to be audited by the auditors.

The selfhost vs buy commercial kind of bounces back and forth. For smaller teams, less than 5 to 10 engineers, it might be a fun endeavour; but from that point on, until you get to mega corp scale with dedicated ops department maintaining your entire infrastructure, it is probably more effective to just pay for a solution from a major vendor in the cloud instead.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Git should be able to go down during the day. Worst case you just can't push to origin for a little while. You can still work and commit locally.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

No PRs means no automated tests/CI/CD, which means you’d slow down the release train. It might typically be just a 2 minutes quick cycle, but that one time it goes off for longer due to a botched update from upstream means you’re never going to do that again during business hours.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Eh, we've had our self-hosted Github go down for a couple hours in the daytime, and it wasn't a big deal. We have something like 60 engineers spread out across the globe, about 15-20 that were directly impacted by the outage (the rest were in different timezones). Yeah, it was annoying, but each engineer only creates like 1 or 2 PRs in a given day, so they posted their PRs after the outage was resolved while working on something else. Yeah, PRs were delayed by a couple hours, but the actual flow of work didn't change, we just had more stuff get posted all at once after the problems resolved.

In fact, Github would have to be out for 2 days straight before we start actually impacting delivery. An hour or two here and there really isn't an issue, especially if the team has advance notice (most of the hit to productivity is everyone trying to troubleshoot at the same time (is it my VPN? Did wifi die? Etc).

[–] swooosh 5 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Nope. Hosting in the cloud isn't possible due to legal reasons.

I don't think that downtimes area serious issue for us.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Must be very unique sector. Good luck with your explorations!

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[–] carl_dungeon 2 points 4 months ago

In our case cloud is fine, as long as it’s within our security boundary- so that means external SaS is out, but hosted within our cloud is fine. I’m still not super excited about the prospect of managing and maintaining it though :/ We're going down this path because AWS is killing code commit and other pipeline stuff, which sucks because even though other tools are better, code commit was fedRamped and from the same vendor.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Biggest pain point was for our ops guy, who constantly had to stay behind to perform upgrades and maintenance,

This is weird.

Hosts selected for updates will be unavailable from 2100-2110 or so. Then they're up.

They're done by at/cron if they're selected.

There's no manual work if the monitoring system thinks they're okay.

Gitlab-ce on-prem. Although that may now suck since they're being bought out; and we all know how that went for redhat.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If you only need a bare minimum, and don't plan to heavily use CI/CD, container/packages registries, integrations with other tools i would go with gitea/forgejo (you can always use external tools on top), else i would use selfhosted Gitlab, it has pretty much all the things you could imagine to need with software development and deployment

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

+1 for Gitlab. As the number of developers increases the features of Gitlab will get more and more important. Only OP can say, but if they're closer to 9 developers than 2, I think it's a safe bet they'll need the extra features sooner rather than later.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (2 children)

At work we selfhost gitlab (paid) and I'm checking gitea for my own projects. They have a good comparison table at https://docs.gitea.com/installation/comparison

Do you also need CI/CD?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Also working in a small team with Gitea. Pretty solid the last few years.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Same. Really happy with it.

[–] swooosh 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Is there a reason to choose gitlab over gitea?

We do not need ci/cd

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

If you don't need CI/CD I don't see any reasons to choose Gitlab over gitea. But I'm still testing gitea so take my words with a grain of salt :)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago

Gitea also has excellent CI support with builtin compatibility with github

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

If you don't need CI/CD I'm not sure why you need a centralized frontend at all. Git itself is distributed and you can setup any code flow you can think of. It has hooks that can be used to set up code quality checks on select branches. There are local history browser apps for every platform and IDE plugins.

A frontend is no substitute for developer communication — usually what the "PR" thing does is sugarcoat the fact the devs don't know how to use Git and/or don't talk to each other.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

If money isn’t a problem then gitlab is your best choice.

It’s the most mature of the options you have available to you.

I use gitlab for airgapped networks

[–] barsquid 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I would use Gitlab only in an airgapped network. Password resets sent to attacker-supplied emails is such a complete failure of a security model it seems like it is only a matter of time until the next critical vulnerability.

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[–] TCB13 10 points 4 months ago

I would go with Gitea or Forgejo (not sure how this is going to last) if you need a complete experience like a WebUI, issues, PR, roles and whatnot.

If you're looking for just a git server then gitolite is very good and solid option. The cool thing about this one is that you create your repositories and add users using a repository inside the thing itself :).

Then you can use any Windows GUI you would like like Fork, SourceTree, your IDE etc...

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

GitLab CE self hosted

[–] ninekeysdown 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

TBH have you tried just basic git? There’s a web interface built into git itself and you can use ssh for your repositories. It’s simple and just works. If you need a faster web interface there’s also cgit. There’s no bells and whistles either. Just configure ssh, drop your repos in /srv and get to work.

If you need more that just standard basic git the. The other suggestions here are great especially forgjo!

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I'll come out with an anti-recommendation: Don't do GitLab.

They used to be quite good, but lately (as in the past two years or so) they've been putting things behind a licensing paywall.

Now if your company wants to pay for GitLab, then maybe consider it? But I'd probably look at some of the other options people have mentioned in this thread.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

The company behind GitLab is seeking buyout offers, so make of that what you will.

My employer uses GitLab CE and it's pretty good, and it is FOSS. The EE version is "open core" so not really FOSS.

If I were starting from scratch I'd be looking into Gitea/Forgejo as well.

[–] swooosh 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm all for foss but foss shall not be a reason to stay behind. We've got enough money to pay for it. We just can't host it anywhere. We have to selfhost it. If there's a good reason to use gitlab over forgejo, we will use gitlab.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Gitlab's main advantage is the tight integration with CI/CD and a web based IDE. But it has some annoying limitations in the non-enterprise version.

Forgejo is great, but it comes with only community support.

You can get commercial support from the Gitea project (from which Forgejo forked off), but if that is something important for you, Gitlab has probably also better commercial support structures in place.

[–] swooosh 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Money is not an issue. We're happy to pay for everything. I'll talk to the others in the next round to get to a conclusion.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Yeah, for the integrated CI/CD, give GitLab a shot - it saves on spinning up a Jenkins or ConcourseCI server.

CI/CD can be useful for triggering automation after merge requests are approved, building infrastructure from code, etc.

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[–] NeoNachtwaechter 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Define, what does "git" mean to you?

The core git is a peer to peer system. You don't need any server at all. It runs on all of your dev's workstations anyway.

If you want a webserver with gitlab etc. on top of it, then that determines most your needs. In addition, a properly set up nameserver is very helpful, and maybe you want even an Active Directory?

[–] swooosh 3 points 4 months ago

We are looking for a versioning system for collaborated work. Each person shall have his own version with a central main version. Being able to commit, push and restore versions.

Thx for asking, we have a nameserver and active directory. We move this system from team foundation server / azure devops server

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

We're also using Forgejo for a small consulting team working on lots of different projects for a lot of different clients.

A couple of our team members who came from a more complex and scaled environment (particularly our DevOps / SRE guy who's worked at such places as LinkedIn and Snowflake) want to move us to Gitlab because it's "more powerful" but I like Forgejo because it's just super simple. Just does exactly what I need, doesn't give me to many more options.

We have

  • Projects segregated into teams, organized by client (so only those working on a specific client's projects have access to their repos).
  • Able to invite clients and put them into the team for their project (we've had a couple clients that want that).
  • Able to automate deployments with webhooks (this was pretty easy to get working).

One of our devs wanted to use Actions. It's hard to get that working and (at least a month ago) there were warnings that Actons aren't mature yet and are probably insecure (looks like that may have changed with the recent jump to Forgejo 8.0). I think it's now a non issue for us though because we were like "Dude, stop trying to role your own CI/CD, that's why we have two infrastructure people!"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Gitea or forgejo, for hosting your repo and managing access rights. WoodpeckerCI when you eventually need a CI/CD. (Is a fork of DroneCI and integrates nicely with gitea.)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

I'm currently looking at onedev.io for personal and startup use but since I haven't had an opportunity to test it out yet I can't vouch for it. It looks cool though and seems to have a good rep.

[–] iN8sWoRLd 3 points 4 months ago

For the server I've used gogs for many years. It was easy to set up and has a web interface. What client you use is really up to you with git.

https://gogs.io/

[–] EncryptKeeper 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

As you look through these recommendations, keep in mind that source code storage will become in-scope for PCI DSS certification in the very near future.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

If you want the full fancy GitHub, they have an on-prem enterprise edition for $21/user/month. https://github.com/pricing

But if you don't need all their bells and whistles, or the team doesn't care about not having the GitHub interface, then the other suggestions are better.

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