10 ms·

Forgejo: A self-hosted lightweight software forge

391 points by thunderbong 2y ago

andsoitis 2y ago
Q: “What is Forgego?” A: “Forgejo is a self-hosted lightweight software forge. Easy to install and low maintenance, it just does the job.” ?
- yawaramin 2y ago
  Without mentioning GitHub/BitBucket/GitLab/etc., how would you describe what they are?
  - eviks 2y ago
    By describing what they do (also, there is no rule you can't mention github)
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    I don't see why it's so critical to not mention Github. That would instantly convey what it is to basically everyone, and it doesn't mean it doesn't have its own identity or anything.
  - pookeh 2y ago
    Collaborative development platform with Git repository hosting, CI/CD, and project management features.
    - thayne 2y ago
      I.e. a software forge. I do think it would be good to have a link or something to explain what a software forge is to people who don't know.
      - int0x29 2y ago
        If it doesn't support SVN or Mercurial I don't see a need to try and be abstract. At a minimum it needs to use the word Git because that page is inscrutable. Also a features page would really help
      - cortesoft 2y ago
        I have been a software developer for over 30 years, and have never heard the term “software forge” before.
    - cookiengineer 2y ago
      Great! Now let's see if someone really cares enough to make a pull request or whether these complaints are just superficial to have something to complain about.
      - c00kien1gg3r 2y ago
        [dead]
  - fishgoesblub 2y ago
    "A platform to host your git repositories including collaboration features like issues, discussions, and a projects page to track important parts of your code base. All able to run on your server local and private."
  - Borealid 2y ago
    "Forgejo hosts source code repositories, lets you track and manage issues (and review code changes), and provides all the integrations you'd expect with CI/CD and similar tooling."
    - rmgk 2y ago
      This seems to be a good tagline for a HN audience that kinda clicks a link blind and wants to figure out what it is quickly and move on. But it’s unclear to me why the Forgejo website should care about this type of visitor? Being a “forge” is likely well understood by anyone that is interested in installing this type of software (or they will figure it out because of the context that linked them to the page). None of the features you mention is a good discriminator, as essentially all forges have these features in one form or another, so an interested use will have to look at the details anyway. Being: “self-hosted, lightweight, easy to maintain” those are very important quick discriminators if you are looking at this type of software.
  - ycombinatrix 2y ago
    Git hosts with proprietary features
  - ang_cire 2y ago
    Source code hosting and version control platform?
  - xeonmc 2y ago
    Repository Hub
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- TNorthover 2y ago
  Their communication really is all over the place. Even the name is really awkward in English. (And yes, not everything should be forced to be English and it's apparently supposed to be Esperanto; but nothing else on the site is so that's not how most people will parse it).
jmpavlec 2y ago
The tag line isn't the most informative. It took me a scroll or two on the main page to figure out its purpose. (Self hosted GitHub alternative). I'd suggest making that clearer earlier as the word "forge" in terms of software could have a variety of interpretations.
- baobun 2y ago
  Disagree. Refering to GitHub as category-defining would be antithetical to the Forgejo spirit. Forgejo stands on its own.
  - phantomathkg 2y ago
    Disagree. Unfortunately Forge is not a well known category defining term. Using it as a tagline defying the purposes to popularize Forgego.
    - szszrk 2y ago
      Yet when posts online described it as an alternative/clone of GitHub/gitlab/gitea it was alsa received with criticism and complains that "what if I don't know what gitea is". Naming and creating descriptions is not trivial, I wish more complaints would also simply come with proposals of better taglines, so we can bash those ideas quickly in comments and cut that long feedback loop.
    - WhyNotHugo 2y ago
      Defining itself as simply an alternative to the mainstream is a not a great way to makes its own identity. Imagine if Fedora presented itself as simply “an open source alternative to windows”. Sure, that might be easier to understand for those less in the field, but really doesn’t help it’s own identity.
    - rollcat 2y ago
      Disagree. SourceForge was established in 1999. The term "software forge" was in widespread use, until Github started gaining mainstream attention. But the term "hub" doesn't necessarily always refer to the same thing - e.g. certain adult entertainment website is also using it.
davidkellis 2y ago
It sounds like this is trying to coin a new term. I hadn't heard the word forge used to mean an all-in-one git+issue tracker+project mgmt+etc. suite before.
- lfam 2y ago
  Ever heard of Sourceforge?
  - photonthug 2y ago
    This is a bad association even for people that recognize it. Presumably there were good years but most will probably remember the ugly endgame with awkward UX and weird ads masquerading as fake download links.
    - astrange 2y ago
      I don't remember any era of sourceforge where it had good UI. I also don't remember anyone ever calling it a "software forge".
    - coolgoose 2y ago
      This is such an interesting thing of generational difference, since I remember sourceforge fondly before the crazy era of so many ads.
    - yencabulator 2y ago
      Now that I think of it, Sourceforge is perhaps the first good example of enshittification in this domain that I can think of. The thing about enshittification is, first you need to eyeballs and brand, before you can sully it. Sourceforge was great for a while.
  - rdtsc 2y ago
    > Ever heard of Sourceforge? Yup! That clears it up. It’s the site that serves lots of ads and binary packages of some old software. At least as of the last time I looked some years ago. Ok then, not sure I would want more things like that today to self host, but to each their own.
kstrauser 2y ago
I’ve migrated over the years from Gogs to Gitea to Forgejo. It’s such an excellent piece of software. 90% of the time, I can get by with hosting my personal git repos on an SSH server I have. When all I’m trying to do is put my Chezmoi repo somewhere that all my computers can access it, Forgejo and friends don’t add much to it. For the 10% of the time when I want to share my code privately with some friends it’s brilliant (and free beats a GitHub paid plan). And if I’m going to have it running anyway for those 10% projects, might as well use it as my personal git repo of record for everything else, too.
- okucu 2y ago
  Did you notice any important differences between gitea and forgejo (besides ideology)? Although it seems like forgejo has added actions in the meantime
  - kdmtctl 2y ago
    Gitea also has actions. https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/overview https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/overview
    - lolinder 2y ago
      Gitea actually got actions before Forgejo did. That was part of what motivated Forgejo to become a hard fork instead of just a rebrand—there was some sort of disagreement about the way in which actions were rolled out and Forgejo decided from there to stop trying to be fully compatible. https://forgejo.org/2024-02-forking-forward/#the-hard-forking-process https://forgejo.org/2024-02-forking-forward/#the-hard-forkin...
      - kdmtctl 2y ago
        I've missed that part. AFAIK both are forked from nektos/act and can't be dramatically different. All this story is an unnecessary dichotomy for me. Still hosting production code on a Gitea instance and will happily pay a dime but didn't get why yet.
nikodunk 2y ago
The Fedora Project (Linux) is switching to this, FWIW https://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-moves-towards-forgejo-a-unified-decision/ https://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-moves-towards-forgejo-a-un...
- synergy20 2y ago
  this is big!
DrawTR 2y ago
can anyone share what the benefit is over using a self hosted repository host over a service like github/gitlab? obviously you get more power over the interface & such but are there truly any gains over using the larger platforms?
- PhilipRoman 2y ago
  Aside from the whole self hosting ethos, if you are hosting it from a home server and you are the primary user, you will get a nice performance boost. Downloading binaries, cloning repositories will be instant. If you use CI, it will be running on an actual machine rather than 10% of some 2GHz cloud CPU. I regularly have to upload multi GB images to a VPS and it's very annoying when it takes like 10 minutes.
  - Macha 2y ago
    Two self hosting tips: If you're going to use SQLite, make sure you enable the WAL mode on the database. It makes such a huge difference to performance that I don't know why it isn't the default. If you're going to have multiple concurrent users (or even just one user but a large number of background writing jobs, such as mirroring public repositories), then seriously consider using Postgres. Yes, theoretically it's possible to make SQLite backed applications work fine in this scenario, but Gogs/Gitea/Forgejo has not designed their application like that, so it falls over at surprisingly small sizes and migrating after the fact is painful.
- Ringz 2y ago
  A self hosted repository host gives you the ability to develop software projects without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  It's very useful for companies - more control, don't have to host your code externally, and you don't have to pay (well, ish; we ended up paying for Gitlab Premium, but that doesn't exist for Forgejo).
- 2y ago
seymon 2y ago
Is fogejo the platform that codeberg uses?
- openplatypus 2y ago
  Yes
  - remux 2y ago
    Who owns the Forgejo domains and trademarks? > The Forgejo domains are in the custody of the non-profit Codeberg e.V.. e.g. https://forgejo.org/faq/ https://forgejo.org/faq/
- stop50 2y ago
  And vice versa. Codeberg is the official host of the sourcecode
tmountain 2y ago
Looks interesting but I’m not quite sure exactly what it is based on what I am seeing on the front page.
Kwpolska 2y ago
[dead]
blacklight 2y ago
I did my Github -> self-hosted Gitlab -> Gitea -> Forgejo journey over the years, and I haven't looked back. Forgejo is great and it's probably going to become even greater once federation is done (having distributed forks and PRs across multiple instances solves the fragmentation problem of self-hosted solutions). And I lost my trust in Gitea once it spun off a for-profit branch backed by VC money (which was exactly the reason why it was forked into Forgejo). The only thing I lost from Gitlab is the out-of-the-box CI/CD platform. But I could migrate my pipelines to Drone CI and trigger them via webhooks. Just keep in mind that, depending on the complexity of your Gitlab pipelines, this may not always be an option. Anyway, for me hosting a Gitlab server that hogged up 5GB of RAM to serve a couple of small projects was a big no-no. Forgejo takes 500MB of RAM at peak.
jazzyjackson 2y ago
From the FAQ, forˈd͡ʒe.jo, to my midwestern ear, "4 Jay yo", Esperantese for Forge. A fork of Gitea [0] but managed via a non profit, no premium upsells, all freely licensed [1](GPL) etc. Good to see their community outreach is via Matrix and Mastadon. My kind of nerds. Apparently this is what Codeberg is running out, if you click . Looks like gitea/github to me, nothing wrong with that [2] source code is available from the little branch icon in the top right corner, hosted on codeberg which TIL is a forgejo instance [3] [0] https://forgejo.org/2024-02-forking-forward/ https://forgejo.org/2024-02-forking-forward/ [1] https://forgejo.org/2024-08-gpl/ https://forgejo.org/2024-08-gpl/ [2] https://v10.next.forgejo.org/explore/repos https://v10.next.forgejo.org/explore/repos [3] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo
- xena 2y ago
  It's more like "forge place" in the same way that kafejo (cafe) is "coffee place".
  - Karliss 2y ago
    That's English for you, same word is usable for describing action, place and the furnace.
  - colanderman 2y ago
    It's actually more like "distant gay" (and would be pronounced with a hard "g") because it's a (presumably deliberate) misspelling of forĝejo.
- asddubs 2y ago
  I was kind of passively wondering the other day what the main differences were between gitea and forgejo at this point, since they've been separate projects for a bit now. It seems there aren't any direct comparisons I could find, though.
- geek_at 2y ago
  > no premium upsells So.. like gitea? From my understanding the fork was done because gitea created a company to build custom-features for companies if they ask. Not really many indicators for a rugpull
yoavm 2y ago
Checking out https://v10.next.forgejo.org/explore/repos https://v10.next.forgejo.org/explore/repos , the main thing I notice in comparison to GitHub is how fast this is. I wish GitHub was so fast.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  Now picture it running on-prem !
- homebrewer 2y ago
  There are only five pages of repositories there, so it's no surprise it responds quickly. We've been running gitea for several years, and when you put enough data into it (repositories, issues, comments, etc) it doesn't feel as fast anymore, although most pages still render within 500 ms. For example, opening large-ish issues can stall the server for a second or two (it reports rendering time in the footer, so I'm sure it's the server).
  - yoavm 2y ago
    I don't know if that's the whole story? Sure, GitHub has more data to process (and way more compute), but even when switching between tabs within one repo (going from code to pull requests, for example) GitHub is still much slower even though its query shouldn't be affected by the number of repositories it has.
  - zipy124 2y ago
    Click on any repo from: https://codeberg.org/explore/repos https://codeberg.org/explore/repos It's very speedy. Not as much as sourcehut, but you get a nicer UI. Github is becoming slow enough to meaningfully detract from productivity.
    - coder543 2y ago
      I noticed some surprising load times on Codeberg’s Forgejo instance. For example: - The first page of releases (out of only 63 releases total) takes 3–5.5 seconds to load: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/releases https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/releases - The issues page is faster at ~1.5 seconds, but still a bit slow: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues - The commits page for the main branch (22k commits) is much slower, taking over 11 seconds: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/commits/branch/forgejo https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/commits/branch/forgejo These load times were surprising to me given the relatively small amount of data being loaded (just the first page of results)... It feels like there could be an inefficient query at play here? The HTML responses aren’t huge (~400kB), and my ping to Codeberg (~125ms, US<-->Berlin?) shouldn’t be a major factor when just loading a single HTML document without factoring in other resources. I also have gigabit internet, and while there could be bottlenecks between here and Europe, they surely wouldn’t be responsible for slowing things down to this degree. For comparison, I’ve run Gitea on a local server, and it’s been lightning fast, even with larger datasets. For example, on a test with the Linux kernel repo (1.3M commits), Gitea rendered the first page of commits in under 500ms. That’s a stark contrast to the 11 seconds it took on Codeberg’s Forgejo instance for just 22k commits. I wonder if this slowness is more of a Codeberg hosting issue or something inherent to Forgejo, but I haven't tried Forgejo locally.
lloeki 2y ago
An interesting aspect of Forgejo is ongoing work on forge federation https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59#issuecomment-1652830 https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59#issuecomment-... In an ideal world github and gitlab would also support federation, but I guess that's probably not going to happen. An alternative solution in the problem space would be going p2p, e.g https://radicle.xyz/ https://radicle.xyz/
- franga2000 2y ago
  It's a shame "federation" these days basically just means "implement activitpub". So many projects get caught up in the complicated mess of mapping their data model onto AP, debating about how exactly to map things and writing standard extension proposals.... Useful federation between Forgejo instances could be solved with little more than OIDC and a few webhooks (cross-instance collaboration, forking, and PRs). Nobody needs federation between Forgejo and Mastodon - what would that even mean??
  - FireInsight 2y ago
    I tend to agree that ActivityPub seems pretty horrifying to work with (as an outsider). At least it works, though, and is implemented by a large amount of different projects and not owned by any single one.
    - diggan 2y ago
      > seems pretty horrifying to work with (as an outsider). As someone who both made my own implementation + hacked on others, what was/seemed to be the horrible parts? It's a pretty simple standard that is basically RSS with some added stuff (very simplified of course, before I got jumped) for facilitating the federation parts.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > So many projects get caught up in the complicated mess of mapping their data model onto AP, debating about how exactly to map things and writing standard extension proposals.... Well, you either use an existing standard so you can federate with existing implementations, or you come up with a new standard and ask others to implement that. Seems they chose the simpler way, thankfully. > Useful federation between Forgejo instances could be solved with little more than OIDC and a few webhooks (cross-instance collaboration, forking, and PRs). What about federation between more software than just your own? Once you've done those things, you basically end up with another spec (but informal instead of formal) that others also need to implement. So instead of going the informal way, they aim for the formal one. That does sound appropriate to me. Slightly besides the point, but for someone who dealt more with decentralized/distributed systems than bloated authentication systems, it seems both simpler and easier to map+implement ActivityPub than implement OIDC+"a few webhooks", but that might just be because of my familiarity. I'll say that ActivityPub is a pretty simple standard though, compared to what's out there.
criticalfault 2y ago
The project is amazing The name of the project is horrible
thiht 2y ago
I wish they would have chosen a better name. Honestly if I have to install a Git server one day I’m gonna install Gitea, not a tool I can’t even pronounce. Names are important, this is why I also don’t use DuckDuckGo. The reasons for forking from Gitea were also a bit weak in my opinion.
- runiq 2y ago
  That's a weak reason and you know it.
  - tasuki 2y ago
    I think they don't.
  - homebrewer 2y ago
    It might not be a very strong reason, but quite enough to pick the original project which also has more development effort behind it (and is still used by Blender FWIW, I don't think they have any plans of migrating). I understand your first language is German. Figures. The name is unpronounceable and feels weird to me also. If we ever migrate from gitea (although I currently see no reason to do it), I'll have to pick some generic term and introduce it to others under that name.
    - rmgk 2y ago
      > I understand your first language is German. Figures. I assume your argument is: “Everyone who had to learn English as a second language is so used to completely random pronunciation that they won’t complain about anything anymore”.
      - homebrewer 2y ago
        It's just that German is close enough to Esperanto that I'm personally not particularly interested in what a German speaker thinks about the name. Ask a Mandarin/Japanese/Arabic/Ewe/Telugu/etc. speaker what they think. (My first language is quite far away from both English and Esperanto, probably should have mentioned that in the original message.)
CGamesPlay 2y ago
Does this have a CI/CD solution? I don't see anything from skimming the user docs.
- throawayonthe 2y ago
  they are currently developing Forgejo Actions[0], or you can use the existing Woodpecker[1] [0] https://forgejo.org/docs/next/user/actions/ https://forgejo.org/docs/next/user/actions/ [1] https://woodpecker-ci.org/docs/administration/forges/forgejo https://woodpecker-ci.org/docs/administration/forges/forgejo
- javitury 2y ago
  Yes, you need to spin a forgejo runner
- girvo 2y ago
  It does, called “Actions” https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/actions/ https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/actions/
  - CGamesPlay 2y ago
    Neat! Thanks. I see this is located in the docs between "comment via email" and "message templates". If the devs see this, perhaps adding more buzzwords would be helpful to discovery.
jwildeboer 2y ago
After my struggles with trying to keep Gitlab CE (Community Edition) up and running (it needs a lot of CPU and memory) I switched to Forgejo and have not been disappointed. It runs as a rootless container and uses almost nothing, memory and CPU wise. Updating it has been a simple podman pull that JustWorks(tm). It now also runs actions that keep my static websites updated by running Jekyll etc. I really like it to have my own forge that can import repos, issues etc from other forges like GitHub, Gitlab etc. and I am looking forward to the upcoming ActivityPub based integration to the wider fediverse. Having a decentralised, but connected approach to code hosting is what I always wanted to have and now it’s (almost) there.
- jimjimwii 2y ago
  What is the status of federation support? I imagine cross-instance pull requests and bug reports would make collaboration effortless.
deleted 2y ago
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NoboruWataya 2y ago
Can anyone who migrated from Gitea to Forgejo explain the differences in usability? I understand the fork was driven by licensing/project ownership concerns but it's not clear to me from reading the website how different the end product is now. I believe Gitea is still being actively developed. I host a private Gitea instance (mainly to mirror all my GitHub stuff) so wondering if it is worth migrating.
- isodev 2y ago
  They have a FAQ (https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/ https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/) TLDR: Forgejo is free software, prioritizes security and stability over new features and is actively developing the federation module (thus working to enable communities of federated forges)
- homebrewer 2y ago
  I evaluated it again a couple of weeks ago and there are basically no differences right now (besides a few cosmetic ones) because the hard fork happened just a few months ago. Stick on 1.22 for the time being, it's the last version from which Forgejo supports in-place upgrades. You'll have to transfer data half-manually or perform deep surgery on the database if you upgrade past 1.22 and then decide to switch forges. Although the next version of gitea should include support for full mirroring from GitHub (so periodic synchronization of new issues, PRs, etc), not just (code mirroring XOR one-off full copy) like it does right now. This might be of interest to you.
- adduc 2y ago
  A lot of their early value-proposition were saner security defaults and additions to increase confidence in the software's security. A lot of the changes were attempted to upstream into Gitea, but not everything made its way in. They were a soft-fork for a while before hard-forking, and even after the hard-fork continued to sync changes from Gitea where possible. Forgejo v10 is the first release I've seen where there's been a focus on tiny UX improvements (versus trying to remain compatible with Gitea). I'm hopeful these will continue to come, but it does still feel essentially identical in appearance and functionality with Gitea.
bjackman 2y ago
Can anyone comment on the code review experience? (I assume similar to Gitea but I haven't tried either). I recently did some moderately serious code review in GitHub and discovered it's a baby's toy version of a code review tool. It seems it would be unusable for serious engineering work unless you totally design your source control model around making that work, at the expense of all the other things that influence how you wanna manage your history. I am mostly used to Gerrit which has a very reasonable basic model but a lot of rough edges and some performance issues. Suddenly I realised I don't think I've ever actually used a review tool I really like! I wonder if our industry is just getting by without one? IIRC the Gitlab one was slightly better than GitHub but I can't remember too much about it.
- losdanielos 2y ago
  Have you tried Codelantis? It's a review tool for GitHub
- acidburnNSA 2y ago
  I've used Phabricator and GitHub to design nuclear power plant design code... seems pretty serious. Can you tell us more about what's missing in your opinion from making the reviews usable? Curious what I've been missing out on!
  - CraigRood 2y ago
    I miss Phabricator. Whilst it was certainly overkill for personal use, the additional applications meant I could do so much in one place and have everything integrated. Funny how what we have now, including GitHub feels a step back.
  - bjackman 2y ago
    The fundamental issue is that GitHub thinks the artifact you are reviewing is code. But the artifact I want to review is a series of commits. I make review comments like "please split this into a separate commit", "please add info XYZ to the commit message". GitHub doesn't offer any way to review changes to those things. If the author force-pushes (which is normal and healthy if you are iterating on a series of patches, instead of on a blob of code) there's no way to diff the details I want to look at. Compare Gerrit where for each individual commit you can diff between two versions of that commit, with a side-by-side UI showing the comments inline that the changes were made in response to. From speaking to friends I believe this is because "why would you force-push? Just push a new commit called 'respond to review comments'". When I said "but now your commit log is a mess" they say "no, you just squash the whole PR into a single commit when you merge it. So... yes, your commit log is a mess. Bear in mind there is also no support for dependencies between PRs. So basically, you are throttled to one in-flight PR per area of work at a time. So... your commits are gonna end up being huge. Not really viable for a large project. I have noticed that there are major projects like k8s underway on Github and they seem to get by, so maybe I'm missing something. I know that Go allow PRs but if you wanna do serious contributions they will funnel you to contribute via Gerrit instead.
KingMob 2y ago
I got curious about why Forgejo split off from Gitea, and it seems like yet another case of broke FOSS creators/maintainers getting screwed from above (and maybe below too). From the Gitea incorporation announcement (below), it looks like they couldn't pay their bills as FOSS, and there were wealthy free-riders (which the MIT license allows). > "Over the years we have tried various ways to support maintainers and the project. Some ways we have tried include bounties, direct donations, grants, and a few others. We have found that while there have been many wonderful individuals, and a few corporations who have been incredibly generous, and we are so thankful for their support, there are a few corporations (with revenues that are greater than some countries GDP) are building on Gitea for core products without even contributing back enhancements. [emphasis added] I'm not a fan of Bruce Perens, but he kind of nails the problem when he says: > "We have a great corporate welfare program, our users are the richest companies in the world. Indeed, we've enabled companies like Google to be created. > "In contrast, if our developers aren't working for those companies, they probably go un-compensated." ---- On the flip side, the community rebelled when the creators formed a company, but not supposedly because they formed a company, but because that co held the domain and trademark. Seems like a small hill to die on to me, but I don't know the details. Regardless, it looks like exhibit #187 of FOSS failing for anyone outside of hobbyists and FAANGs.
- Vampiero 2y ago
  It's not that FOSS fails, it's that unethical corporations worth billions of dollars go unpunished for abusing it (because the law exists to protect them). FOSS is fundamentally anarchy (the good kind that shows that human beings are not all pieces of shit). Anarchy can't exist in a capitalist society because it shows people that they don't HAVE to live like slaves. They can live as members of tribes, as evolution intended for us. So as always the organism is originally healthy and successful until the parasite that is capitalism spreads and suffocates it for its own reproduction.
  - dotancohen 2y ago
    What is unethical about the actions of the corporations who use the software? They did so in accordance with the license.
tuananh 2y ago
we are considering moving from gitlab to forgejo. it's not a immediate concern but i think the days of gitlab are numbered with recent change in top management.
prakashn27 2y ago
Ex-meta engineer here. I miss their internal GitHub which is a mercurial fork. They have so many awesome features like layered PRs. That is something I have not seen anywhere .
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dartos 2y ago
Been using forgejo for years to maintain mirrors of GitHub repos I like. Works great. Easy to set up (especially on nixos)
jamsio 2y ago
[flagged]
- meonkeys 2y ago
  Please explain. Not clicking those links.
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antoineMoPa 2y ago
It's not clear from the landing page whether it's a git code platform / mercurial / entirely new VCS. I wish it was clearer (looking at the Readme, looks like it's indeed a git hosting platform). I don't really care about the governance model as a user seeing this landing page for the first time, so I wonder why it's so prominent, vs telling me what the actual product is.
- yencabulator 2y ago
  The governance model is the reason for its existence -- Gitea went stupid proprietary, so this is the rebel alliance being proud of being the rebel alliance.
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vollbrecht 2y ago
I think this is a great peace of software, though i think its mostly tailored for the single dev, or business case for closed source software, but much less a software peace that allow for great community building. I think this is because of: a) The network effect that you inherently get with for example github b) The barrier to create accounts on yet another platform to contribute. In that regards i find the original way of just using email's to send patches just such a brilliant idea, because at least it eliminates my second point completely. That's why i think sourcehut [0] is such a nice idea at least in theory. Though now you have to teach people not only how to use "git" but also how to use "git" via email :D https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/
- mroche 2y ago
  Gitea and Forgejo support OAuth integration and AGit Flow*, which is a breath of fresh air compared to the connected "fork" and PR strategies. It's a good middle ground between the "modern" method and email collaboration. With some UX tweaks it could become very accessible for many. Available platforms like Codeberg provide the option to sign in/register with GitHub and GitLab auth, so needing "yet another account" has become a much weaker argument. * https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/agit-support/ https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/agit-support/
CyberDildonics 2y ago
Is it a "software forge" or is it just using git locally?
- remram 2y ago
  It is similar to GitHub, it's a fork of Gitea whose site has screenshots: https://about.gitea.com/ https://about.gitea.com/ (couldn't find any on Forgejo's site)
qudat 2y ago
I’m working on a git collaboration server that doesn’t require a git remote. The premise is to leverage format-patch with an ssh app and then rely on range-diff: https://pr.pico.sh https://pr.pico.sh I’m curious what others here think
- sitkack 2y ago
  I think it is an interesting take. It might be nice to point folks towards https://github.com/picosh/git-pr https://github.com/picosh/git-pr it has a better explanation. So this is like the email source diff/patching workflow but extended to use ssh instead? I try and limit my ssh access to servers and endpoints that I control. The attack surface for ssh is actually quite large. It seems since you are shipping a patch, that it could be signed with your ssh key, but posted over https. This would make running a server way way more portable. Everything else about it seems quite nice. Since the language is Go, creating an https service should be just as easy correct? I like the idea of dynamic RSS streams with patches flying around. https://www.phind.com/search?cache=izzjsrslnqwrwmh3mtxwyrx4 https://www.phind.com/search?cache=izzjsrslnqwrwmh3mtxwyrx4
  - qudat 2y ago
    Exactly. People don’t struggle with format-patch, they struggle with integrating patches into their email clients. Our design philosophy is to not require the project’s git repo in order to enable developers to collaborate. We are also trying to make this service a supplement to other code forges. Competing with GitHub is a huge uphill battle, instead I’m thinking of this service more as a patch-bin instead of a git collaboration tool for corporate entities
    - sitkack 2y ago
      I like the concept of patch-bin, great description.
- lima 2y ago
  This is more or less how Phabricator (dead, but lives on as Phorge[1]) works. It uploads/downloads patches via HTTP. IMO, using Git remotes but with a one-review-unit-per-commit approach like Gerrit has a much better UX. Shipping around diffs has all sorts of sharp edges, especially when you stack multiple changes or binary data, and you end up reinventing native Git functionality but worse. Phabricator started out as "paste your diff here" and eventually ended up with a CLI tool that reinvented half of the Git CLI. [1]: https://we.phorge.it https://we.phorge.it
hackerbrother 2y ago
I think Gitea not being maintained via Gitea was reason enough to fork it— I am glad Forgejo did!
kamikazechaser 2y ago
I'm not sold on Forgejo as a better alternative to Gitea. The Forgejo fork was completely unnecessary. The trigger behind the fork was the Forgejo authors tried to add their own copyright header into a patch contributed back to Gitea. They (Forgejo/Codeberg) followed it up with a lot of misinformation on FOSS e.t.c. some of which is still on their Gitea comparison page that ended up fracturing the community. Some Codeberg admins had at some point threatened to blanket ban certain types of projects, notably anything slightly related to blockchain tech and that has always made me cautious of their site.

391 points by thunderbong 2y ago

Q: “What is Forgego?” A: “Forgejo is a self-hosted lightweight software forge. Easy to install and low maintenance, it just does the job.” ?

yawaramin 2y ago
Without mentioning GitHub/BitBucket/GitLab/etc., how would you describe what they are?
- eviks 2y ago
  By describing what they do (also, there is no rule you can't mention github)
- IshKebab 2y ago
  I don't see why it's so critical to not mention Github. That would instantly convey what it is to basically everyone, and it doesn't mean it doesn't have its own identity or anything.
- pookeh 2y ago
  Collaborative development platform with Git repository hosting, CI/CD, and project management features.
  - thayne 2y ago
    I.e. a software forge. I do think it would be good to have a link or something to explain what a software forge is to people who don't know.
    - int0x29 2y ago
      If it doesn't support SVN or Mercurial I don't see a need to try and be abstract. At a minimum it needs to use the word Git because that page is inscrutable. Also a features page would really help
    - cortesoft 2y ago
      I have been a software developer for over 30 years, and have never heard the term “software forge” before.
  - cookiengineer 2y ago
    Great! Now let's see if someone really cares enough to make a pull request or whether these complaints are just superficial to have something to complain about.
    - c00kien1gg3r 2y ago
      [dead]
- fishgoesblub 2y ago
  "A platform to host your git repositories including collaboration features like issues, discussions, and a projects page to track important parts of your code base. All able to run on your server local and private."
- Borealid 2y ago
  "Forgejo hosts source code repositories, lets you track and manage issues (and review code changes), and provides all the integrations you'd expect with CI/CD and similar tooling."
  - rmgk 2y ago
    This seems to be a good tagline for a HN audience that kinda clicks a link blind and wants to figure out what it is quickly and move on. But it’s unclear to me why the Forgejo website should care about this type of visitor? Being a “forge” is likely well understood by anyone that is interested in installing this type of software (or they will figure it out because of the context that linked them to the page). None of the features you mention is a good discriminator, as essentially all forges have these features in one form or another, so an interested use will have to look at the details anyway. Being: “self-hosted, lightweight, easy to maintain” those are very important quick discriminators if you are looking at this type of software.
- ycombinatrix 2y ago
  Git hosts with proprietary features
- ang_cire 2y ago
  Source code hosting and version control platform?
- xeonmc 2y ago
  Repository Hub
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
TNorthover 2y ago
Their communication really is all over the place. Even the name is really awkward in English. (And yes, not everything should be forced to be English and it's apparently supposed to be Esperanto; but nothing else on the site is so that's not how most people will parse it).

jmpavlec 2y ago

The tag line isn't the most informative. It took me a scroll or two on the main page to figure out its purpose. (Self hosted GitHub alternative). I'd suggest making that clearer earlier as the word "forge" in terms of software could have a variety of interpretations.

baobun 2y ago
Disagree. Refering to GitHub as category-defining would be antithetical to the Forgejo spirit. Forgejo stands on its own.
- phantomathkg 2y ago
  Disagree. Unfortunately Forge is not a well known category defining term. Using it as a tagline defying the purposes to popularize Forgego.
  - szszrk 2y ago
    Yet when posts online described it as an alternative/clone of GitHub/gitlab/gitea it was alsa received with criticism and complains that "what if I don't know what gitea is". Naming and creating descriptions is not trivial, I wish more complaints would also simply come with proposals of better taglines, so we can bash those ideas quickly in comments and cut that long feedback loop.
  - WhyNotHugo 2y ago
    Defining itself as simply an alternative to the mainstream is a not a great way to makes its own identity. Imagine if Fedora presented itself as simply “an open source alternative to windows”. Sure, that might be easier to understand for those less in the field, but really doesn’t help it’s own identity.
  - rollcat 2y ago
    Disagree. SourceForge was established in 1999. The term "software forge" was in widespread use, until Github started gaining mainstream attention. But the term "hub" doesn't necessarily always refer to the same thing - e.g. certain adult entertainment website is also using it.

davidkellis 2y ago

It sounds like this is trying to coin a new term. I hadn't heard the word forge used to mean an all-in-one git+issue tracker+project mgmt+etc. suite before.

lfam 2y ago
Ever heard of Sourceforge?
- photonthug 2y ago
  This is a bad association even for people that recognize it. Presumably there were good years but most will probably remember the ugly endgame with awkward UX and weird ads masquerading as fake download links.
  - astrange 2y ago
    I don't remember any era of sourceforge where it had good UI. I also don't remember anyone ever calling it a "software forge".
  - coolgoose 2y ago
    This is such an interesting thing of generational difference, since I remember sourceforge fondly before the crazy era of so many ads.
  - yencabulator 2y ago
    Now that I think of it, Sourceforge is perhaps the first good example of enshittification in this domain that I can think of. The thing about enshittification is, first you need to eyeballs and brand, before you can sully it. Sourceforge was great for a while.
- rdtsc 2y ago
  > Ever heard of Sourceforge? Yup! That clears it up. It’s the site that serves lots of ads and binary packages of some old software. At least as of the last time I looked some years ago. Ok then, not sure I would want more things like that today to self host, but to each their own.

kstrauser 2y ago

I’ve migrated over the years from Gogs to Gitea to Forgejo. It’s such an excellent piece of software. 90% of the time, I can get by with hosting my personal git repos on an SSH server I have. When all I’m trying to do is put my Chezmoi repo somewhere that all my computers can access it, Forgejo and friends don’t add much to it. For the 10% of the time when I want to share my code privately with some friends it’s brilliant (and free beats a GitHub paid plan). And if I’m going to have it running anyway for those 10% projects, might as well use it as my personal git repo of record for everything else, too.

okucu 2y ago
Did you notice any important differences between gitea and forgejo (besides ideology)? Although it seems like forgejo has added actions in the meantime
- kdmtctl 2y ago
  Gitea also has actions. https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/overview https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/overview
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Gitea actually got actions before Forgejo did. That was part of what motivated Forgejo to become a hard fork instead of just a rebrand—there was some sort of disagreement about the way in which actions were rolled out and Forgejo decided from there to stop trying to be fully compatible. https://forgejo.org/2024-02-forking-forward/#the-hard-forking-process https://forgejo.org/2024-02-forking-forward/#the-hard-forkin...
    - kdmtctl 2y ago
      I've missed that part. AFAIK both are forked from nektos/act and can't be dramatically different. All this story is an unnecessary dichotomy for me. Still hosting production code on a Gitea instance and will happily pay a dime but didn't get why yet.

nikodunk 2y ago

The Fedora Project (Linux) is switching to this, FWIW https://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-moves-towards-forgejo-a-unified-decision/ https://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-moves-towards-forgejo-a-un...

synergy20 2y ago
this is big!

DrawTR 2y ago

can anyone share what the benefit is over using a self hosted repository host over a service like github/gitlab? obviously you get more power over the interface & such but are there truly any gains over using the larger platforms?

PhilipRoman 2y ago
Aside from the whole self hosting ethos, if you are hosting it from a home server and you are the primary user, you will get a nice performance boost. Downloading binaries, cloning repositories will be instant. If you use CI, it will be running on an actual machine rather than 10% of some 2GHz cloud CPU. I regularly have to upload multi GB images to a VPS and it's very annoying when it takes like 10 minutes.
- Macha 2y ago
  Two self hosting tips: If you're going to use SQLite, make sure you enable the WAL mode on the database. It makes such a huge difference to performance that I don't know why it isn't the default. If you're going to have multiple concurrent users (or even just one user but a large number of background writing jobs, such as mirroring public repositories), then seriously consider using Postgres. Yes, theoretically it's possible to make SQLite backed applications work fine in this scenario, but Gogs/Gitea/Forgejo has not designed their application like that, so it falls over at surprisingly small sizes and migrating after the fact is painful.
Ringz 2y ago
A self hosted repository host gives you the ability to develop software projects without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
IshKebab 2y ago
It's very useful for companies - more control, don't have to host your code externally, and you don't have to pay (well, ish; we ended up paying for Gitlab Premium, but that doesn't exist for Forgejo).
2y ago

seymon 2y ago

Is fogejo the platform that codeberg uses?

openplatypus 2y ago
Yes
- remux 2y ago
  Who owns the Forgejo domains and trademarks? > The Forgejo domains are in the custody of the non-profit Codeberg e.V.. e.g. https://forgejo.org/faq/ https://forgejo.org/faq/
stop50 2y ago
And vice versa. Codeberg is the official host of the sourcecode

tmountain 2y ago

Looks interesting but I’m not quite sure exactly what it is based on what I am seeing on the front page.

Kwpolska 2y ago

[dead]

blacklight 2y ago

I did my Github -> self-hosted Gitlab -> Gitea -> Forgejo journey over the years, and I haven't looked back. Forgejo is great and it's probably going to become even greater once federation is done (having distributed forks and PRs across multiple instances solves the fragmentation problem of self-hosted solutions). And I lost my trust in Gitea once it spun off a for-profit branch backed by VC money (which was exactly the reason why it was forked into Forgejo). The only thing I lost from Gitlab is the out-of-the-box CI/CD platform. But I could migrate my pipelines to Drone CI and trigger them via webhooks. Just keep in mind that, depending on the complexity of your Gitlab pipelines, this may not always be an option. Anyway, for me hosting a Gitlab server that hogged up 5GB of RAM to serve a couple of small projects was a big no-no. Forgejo takes 500MB of RAM at peak.

jazzyjackson 2y ago

From the FAQ, forˈd͡ʒe.jo, to my midwestern ear, "4 Jay yo", Esperantese for Forge. A fork of Gitea [0] but managed via a non profit, no premium upsells, all freely licensed [1](GPL) etc. Good to see their community outreach is via Matrix and Mastadon. My kind of nerds. Apparently this is what Codeberg is running out, if you click . Looks like gitea/github to me, nothing wrong with that [2] source code is available from the little branch icon in the top right corner, hosted on codeberg which TIL is a forgejo instance [3] [0] https://forgejo.org/2024-02-forking-forward/ https://forgejo.org/2024-02-forking-forward/ [1] https://forgejo.org/2024-08-gpl/ https://forgejo.org/2024-08-gpl/ [2] https://v10.next.forgejo.org/explore/repos https://v10.next.forgejo.org/explore/repos [3] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo

xena 2y ago
It's more like "forge place" in the same way that kafejo (cafe) is "coffee place".
- Karliss 2y ago
  That's English for you, same word is usable for describing action, place and the furnace.
- colanderman 2y ago
  It's actually more like "distant gay" (and would be pronounced with a hard "g") because it's a (presumably deliberate) misspelling of forĝejo.
asddubs 2y ago
I was kind of passively wondering the other day what the main differences were between gitea and forgejo at this point, since they've been separate projects for a bit now. It seems there aren't any direct comparisons I could find, though.
geek_at 2y ago
> no premium upsells So.. like gitea? From my understanding the fork was done because gitea created a company to build custom-features for companies if they ask. Not really many indicators for a rugpull

yoavm 2y ago

Checking out https://v10.next.forgejo.org/explore/repos https://v10.next.forgejo.org/explore/repos , the main thing I notice in comparison to GitHub is how fast this is. I wish GitHub was so fast.

jazzyjackson 2y ago
Now picture it running on-prem !
homebrewer 2y ago
There are only five pages of repositories there, so it's no surprise it responds quickly. We've been running gitea for several years, and when you put enough data into it (repositories, issues, comments, etc) it doesn't feel as fast anymore, although most pages still render within 500 ms. For example, opening large-ish issues can stall the server for a second or two (it reports rendering time in the footer, so I'm sure it's the server).
- yoavm 2y ago
  I don't know if that's the whole story? Sure, GitHub has more data to process (and way more compute), but even when switching between tabs within one repo (going from code to pull requests, for example) GitHub is still much slower even though its query shouldn't be affected by the number of repositories it has.
- zipy124 2y ago
  Click on any repo from: https://codeberg.org/explore/repos https://codeberg.org/explore/repos It's very speedy. Not as much as sourcehut, but you get a nicer UI. Github is becoming slow enough to meaningfully detract from productivity.
  - coder543 2y ago
    I noticed some surprising load times on Codeberg’s Forgejo instance. For example: - The first page of releases (out of only 63 releases total) takes 3–5.5 seconds to load: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/releases https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/releases - The issues page is faster at ~1.5 seconds, but still a bit slow: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues - The commits page for the main branch (22k commits) is much slower, taking over 11 seconds: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/commits/branch/forgejo https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/commits/branch/forgejo These load times were surprising to me given the relatively small amount of data being loaded (just the first page of results)... It feels like there could be an inefficient query at play here? The HTML responses aren’t huge (~400kB), and my ping to Codeberg (~125ms, US<-->Berlin?) shouldn’t be a major factor when just loading a single HTML document without factoring in other resources. I also have gigabit internet, and while there could be bottlenecks between here and Europe, they surely wouldn’t be responsible for slowing things down to this degree. For comparison, I’ve run Gitea on a local server, and it’s been lightning fast, even with larger datasets. For example, on a test with the Linux kernel repo (1.3M commits), Gitea rendered the first page of commits in under 500ms. That’s a stark contrast to the 11 seconds it took on Codeberg’s Forgejo instance for just 22k commits. I wonder if this slowness is more of a Codeberg hosting issue or something inherent to Forgejo, but I haven't tried Forgejo locally.

lloeki 2y ago

An interesting aspect of Forgejo is ongoing work on forge federation https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59#issuecomment-1652830 https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59#issuecomment-... In an ideal world github and gitlab would also support federation, but I guess that's probably not going to happen. An alternative solution in the problem space would be going p2p, e.g https://radicle.xyz/ https://radicle.xyz/

franga2000 2y ago
It's a shame "federation" these days basically just means "implement activitpub". So many projects get caught up in the complicated mess of mapping their data model onto AP, debating about how exactly to map things and writing standard extension proposals.... Useful federation between Forgejo instances could be solved with little more than OIDC and a few webhooks (cross-instance collaboration, forking, and PRs). Nobody needs federation between Forgejo and Mastodon - what would that even mean??
- FireInsight 2y ago
  I tend to agree that ActivityPub seems pretty horrifying to work with (as an outsider). At least it works, though, and is implemented by a large amount of different projects and not owned by any single one.
  - diggan 2y ago
    > seems pretty horrifying to work with (as an outsider). As someone who both made my own implementation + hacked on others, what was/seemed to be the horrible parts? It's a pretty simple standard that is basically RSS with some added stuff (very simplified of course, before I got jumped) for facilitating the federation parts.
- diggan 2y ago
  > So many projects get caught up in the complicated mess of mapping their data model onto AP, debating about how exactly to map things and writing standard extension proposals.... Well, you either use an existing standard so you can federate with existing implementations, or you come up with a new standard and ask others to implement that. Seems they chose the simpler way, thankfully. > Useful federation between Forgejo instances could be solved with little more than OIDC and a few webhooks (cross-instance collaboration, forking, and PRs). What about federation between more software than just your own? Once you've done those things, you basically end up with another spec (but informal instead of formal) that others also need to implement. So instead of going the informal way, they aim for the formal one. That does sound appropriate to me. Slightly besides the point, but for someone who dealt more with decentralized/distributed systems than bloated authentication systems, it seems both simpler and easier to map+implement ActivityPub than implement OIDC+"a few webhooks", but that might just be because of my familiarity. I'll say that ActivityPub is a pretty simple standard though, compared to what's out there.

criticalfault 2y ago

The project is amazing The name of the project is horrible

thiht 2y ago

I wish they would have chosen a better name. Honestly if I have to install a Git server one day I’m gonna install Gitea, not a tool I can’t even pronounce. Names are important, this is why I also don’t use DuckDuckGo. The reasons for forking from Gitea were also a bit weak in my opinion.

runiq 2y ago
That's a weak reason and you know it.
- tasuki 2y ago
  I think they don't.
- homebrewer 2y ago
  It might not be a very strong reason, but quite enough to pick the original project which also has more development effort behind it (and is still used by Blender FWIW, I don't think they have any plans of migrating). I understand your first language is German. Figures. The name is unpronounceable and feels weird to me also. If we ever migrate from gitea (although I currently see no reason to do it), I'll have to pick some generic term and introduce it to others under that name.
  - rmgk 2y ago
    > I understand your first language is German. Figures. I assume your argument is: “Everyone who had to learn English as a second language is so used to completely random pronunciation that they won’t complain about anything anymore”.
    - homebrewer 2y ago
      It's just that German is close enough to Esperanto that I'm personally not particularly interested in what a German speaker thinks about the name. Ask a Mandarin/Japanese/Arabic/Ewe/Telugu/etc. speaker what they think. (My first language is quite far away from both English and Esperanto, probably should have mentioned that in the original message.)

CGamesPlay 2y ago

Does this have a CI/CD solution? I don't see anything from skimming the user docs.

throawayonthe 2y ago
they are currently developing Forgejo Actions[0], or you can use the existing Woodpecker[1] [0] https://forgejo.org/docs/next/user/actions/ https://forgejo.org/docs/next/user/actions/ [1] https://woodpecker-ci.org/docs/administration/forges/forgejo https://woodpecker-ci.org/docs/administration/forges/forgejo
javitury 2y ago
Yes, you need to spin a forgejo runner
girvo 2y ago
It does, called “Actions” https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/actions/ https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/actions/
- CGamesPlay 2y ago
  Neat! Thanks. I see this is located in the docs between "comment via email" and "message templates". If the devs see this, perhaps adding more buzzwords would be helpful to discovery.

jwildeboer 2y ago

After my struggles with trying to keep Gitlab CE (Community Edition) up and running (it needs a lot of CPU and memory) I switched to Forgejo and have not been disappointed. It runs as a rootless container and uses almost nothing, memory and CPU wise. Updating it has been a simple podman pull that JustWorks(tm). It now also runs actions that keep my static websites updated by running Jekyll etc. I really like it to have my own forge that can import repos, issues etc from other forges like GitHub, Gitlab etc. and I am looking forward to the upcoming ActivityPub based integration to the wider fediverse. Having a decentralised, but connected approach to code hosting is what I always wanted to have and now it’s (almost) there.

jimjimwii 2y ago
What is the status of federation support? I imagine cross-instance pull requests and bug reports would make collaboration effortless.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

NoboruWataya 2y ago

Can anyone who migrated from Gitea to Forgejo explain the differences in usability? I understand the fork was driven by licensing/project ownership concerns but it's not clear to me from reading the website how different the end product is now. I believe Gitea is still being actively developed. I host a private Gitea instance (mainly to mirror all my GitHub stuff) so wondering if it is worth migrating.

isodev 2y ago
They have a FAQ (https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/ https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/) TLDR: Forgejo is free software, prioritizes security and stability over new features and is actively developing the federation module (thus working to enable communities of federated forges)
homebrewer 2y ago
I evaluated it again a couple of weeks ago and there are basically no differences right now (besides a few cosmetic ones) because the hard fork happened just a few months ago. Stick on 1.22 for the time being, it's the last version from which Forgejo supports in-place upgrades. You'll have to transfer data half-manually or perform deep surgery on the database if you upgrade past 1.22 and then decide to switch forges. Although the next version of gitea should include support for full mirroring from GitHub (so periodic synchronization of new issues, PRs, etc), not just (code mirroring XOR one-off full copy) like it does right now. This might be of interest to you.
adduc 2y ago
A lot of their early value-proposition were saner security defaults and additions to increase confidence in the software's security. A lot of the changes were attempted to upstream into Gitea, but not everything made its way in. They were a soft-fork for a while before hard-forking, and even after the hard-fork continued to sync changes from Gitea where possible. Forgejo v10 is the first release I've seen where there's been a focus on tiny UX improvements (versus trying to remain compatible with Gitea). I'm hopeful these will continue to come, but it does still feel essentially identical in appearance and functionality with Gitea.

bjackman 2y ago

Can anyone comment on the code review experience? (I assume similar to Gitea but I haven't tried either). I recently did some moderately serious code review in GitHub and discovered it's a baby's toy version of a code review tool. It seems it would be unusable for serious engineering work unless you totally design your source control model around making that work, at the expense of all the other things that influence how you wanna manage your history. I am mostly used to Gerrit which has a very reasonable basic model but a lot of rough edges and some performance issues. Suddenly I realised I don't think I've ever actually used a review tool I really like! I wonder if our industry is just getting by without one? IIRC the Gitlab one was slightly better than GitHub but I can't remember too much about it.

losdanielos 2y ago
Have you tried Codelantis? It's a review tool for GitHub
acidburnNSA 2y ago
I've used Phabricator and GitHub to design nuclear power plant design code... seems pretty serious. Can you tell us more about what's missing in your opinion from making the reviews usable? Curious what I've been missing out on!
- CraigRood 2y ago
  I miss Phabricator. Whilst it was certainly overkill for personal use, the additional applications meant I could do so much in one place and have everything integrated. Funny how what we have now, including GitHub feels a step back.
- bjackman 2y ago
  The fundamental issue is that GitHub thinks the artifact you are reviewing is code. But the artifact I want to review is a series of commits. I make review comments like "please split this into a separate commit", "please add info XYZ to the commit message". GitHub doesn't offer any way to review changes to those things. If the author force-pushes (which is normal and healthy if you are iterating on a series of patches, instead of on a blob of code) there's no way to diff the details I want to look at. Compare Gerrit where for each individual commit you can diff between two versions of that commit, with a side-by-side UI showing the comments inline that the changes were made in response to. From speaking to friends I believe this is because "why would you force-push? Just push a new commit called 'respond to review comments'". When I said "but now your commit log is a mess" they say "no, you just squash the whole PR into a single commit when you merge it. So... yes, your commit log is a mess. Bear in mind there is also no support for dependencies between PRs. So basically, you are throttled to one in-flight PR per area of work at a time. So... your commits are gonna end up being huge. Not really viable for a large project. I have noticed that there are major projects like k8s underway on Github and they seem to get by, so maybe I'm missing something. I know that Go allow PRs but if you wanna do serious contributions they will funnel you to contribute via Gerrit instead.

KingMob 2y ago

I got curious about why Forgejo split off from Gitea, and it seems like yet another case of broke FOSS creators/maintainers getting screwed from above (and maybe below too). From the Gitea incorporation announcement (below), it looks like they couldn't pay their bills as FOSS, and there were wealthy free-riders (which the MIT license allows). > "Over the years we have tried various ways to support maintainers and the project. Some ways we have tried include bounties, direct donations, grants, and a few others. We have found that while there have been many wonderful individuals, and a few corporations who have been incredibly generous, and we are so thankful for their support, there are a few corporations (with revenues that are greater than some countries GDP) are building on Gitea for core products without even contributing back enhancements. [emphasis added] I'm not a fan of Bruce Perens, but he kind of nails the problem when he says: > "We have a great corporate welfare program, our users are the richest companies in the world. Indeed, we've enabled companies like Google to be created. > "In contrast, if our developers aren't working for those companies, they probably go un-compensated." ---- On the flip side, the community rebelled when the creators formed a company, but not supposedly because they formed a company, but because that co held the domain and trademark. Seems like a small hill to die on to me, but I don't know the details. Regardless, it looks like exhibit #187 of FOSS failing for anyone outside of hobbyists and FAANGs.

Vampiero 2y ago
It's not that FOSS fails, it's that unethical corporations worth billions of dollars go unpunished for abusing it (because the law exists to protect them). FOSS is fundamentally anarchy (the good kind that shows that human beings are not all pieces of shit). Anarchy can't exist in a capitalist society because it shows people that they don't HAVE to live like slaves. They can live as members of tribes, as evolution intended for us. So as always the organism is originally healthy and successful until the parasite that is capitalism spreads and suffocates it for its own reproduction.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  What is unethical about the actions of the corporations who use the software? They did so in accordance with the license.

tuananh 2y ago

we are considering moving from gitlab to forgejo. it's not a immediate concern but i think the days of gitlab are numbered with recent change in top management.

prakashn27 2y ago

Ex-meta engineer here. I miss their internal GitHub which is a mercurial fork. They have so many awesome features like layered PRs. That is something I have not seen anywhere .

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dartos 2y ago

Been using forgejo for years to maintain mirrors of GitHub repos I like. Works great. Easy to set up (especially on nixos)

jamsio 2y ago

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meonkeys 2y ago
Please explain. Not clicking those links.

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antoineMoPa 2y ago

It's not clear from the landing page whether it's a git code platform / mercurial / entirely new VCS. I wish it was clearer (looking at the Readme, looks like it's indeed a git hosting platform). I don't really care about the governance model as a user seeing this landing page for the first time, so I wonder why it's so prominent, vs telling me what the actual product is.

yencabulator 2y ago
The governance model is the reason for its existence -- Gitea went stupid proprietary, so this is the rebel alliance being proud of being the rebel alliance.

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vollbrecht 2y ago

I think this is a great peace of software, though i think its mostly tailored for the single dev, or business case for closed source software, but much less a software peace that allow for great community building. I think this is because of: a) The network effect that you inherently get with for example github b) The barrier to create accounts on yet another platform to contribute. In that regards i find the original way of just using email's to send patches just such a brilliant idea, because at least it eliminates my second point completely. That's why i think sourcehut [0] is such a nice idea at least in theory. Though now you have to teach people not only how to use "git" but also how to use "git" via email :D https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/

mroche 2y ago
Gitea and Forgejo support OAuth integration and AGit Flow*, which is a breath of fresh air compared to the connected "fork" and PR strategies. It's a good middle ground between the "modern" method and email collaboration. With some UX tweaks it could become very accessible for many. Available platforms like Codeberg provide the option to sign in/register with GitHub and GitLab auth, so needing "yet another account" has become a much weaker argument. * https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/agit-support/ https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/agit-support/

CyberDildonics 2y ago

Is it a "software forge" or is it just using git locally?

remram 2y ago
It is similar to GitHub, it's a fork of Gitea whose site has screenshots: https://about.gitea.com/ https://about.gitea.com/ (couldn't find any on Forgejo's site)

qudat 2y ago

I’m working on a git collaboration server that doesn’t require a git remote. The premise is to leverage format-patch with an ssh app and then rely on range-diff: https://pr.pico.sh https://pr.pico.sh I’m curious what others here think

sitkack 2y ago
I think it is an interesting take. It might be nice to point folks towards https://github.com/picosh/git-pr https://github.com/picosh/git-pr it has a better explanation. So this is like the email source diff/patching workflow but extended to use ssh instead? I try and limit my ssh access to servers and endpoints that I control. The attack surface for ssh is actually quite large. It seems since you are shipping a patch, that it could be signed with your ssh key, but posted over https. This would make running a server way way more portable. Everything else about it seems quite nice. Since the language is Go, creating an https service should be just as easy correct? I like the idea of dynamic RSS streams with patches flying around. https://www.phind.com/search?cache=izzjsrslnqwrwmh3mtxwyrx4 https://www.phind.com/search?cache=izzjsrslnqwrwmh3mtxwyrx4
- qudat 2y ago
  Exactly. People don’t struggle with format-patch, they struggle with integrating patches into their email clients. Our design philosophy is to not require the project’s git repo in order to enable developers to collaborate. We are also trying to make this service a supplement to other code forges. Competing with GitHub is a huge uphill battle, instead I’m thinking of this service more as a patch-bin instead of a git collaboration tool for corporate entities
  - sitkack 2y ago
    I like the concept of patch-bin, great description.
lima 2y ago
This is more or less how Phabricator (dead, but lives on as Phorge[1]) works. It uploads/downloads patches via HTTP. IMO, using Git remotes but with a one-review-unit-per-commit approach like Gerrit has a much better UX. Shipping around diffs has all sorts of sharp edges, especially when you stack multiple changes or binary data, and you end up reinventing native Git functionality but worse. Phabricator started out as "paste your diff here" and eventually ended up with a CLI tool that reinvented half of the Git CLI. [1]: https://we.phorge.it https://we.phorge.it

hackerbrother 2y ago

I think Gitea not being maintained via Gitea was reason enough to fork it— I am glad Forgejo did!

kamikazechaser 2y ago

I'm not sold on Forgejo as a better alternative to Gitea. The Forgejo fork was completely unnecessary. The trigger behind the fork was the Forgejo authors tried to add their own copyright header into a patch contributed back to Gitea. They (Forgejo/Codeberg) followed it up with a lot of misinformation on FOSS e.t.c. some of which is still on their Gitea comparison page that ended up fracturing the community. Some Codeberg admins had at some point threatened to blanket ban certain types of projects, notably anything slightly related to blockchain tech and that has always made me cautious of their site.