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Ask HN: What alternatives to GitHub are you using?
Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of chatter about GitHub alternatives. I’m interested in looking into them as well but I was curious what everyone else’s experience was.
I’ve been looking at Codeberg but I’m really anxious to leave GitHub Actions behind and Codeberg’s replacement doesn’t seem ready yet.
- nik736 1y agoSelf hosted Gitea with Gitea Actions. Works like a charm for me and a team of 5.
- synack 1y agoA directory called “git” with a bunch of bare repos accessed over ssh. You don’t need to make this complicated.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- matths 1y agobut then you don't have the pull request feature, do you?
- dboreham 1y agoSoftware was developed before the pull request. Typically proposed diffs were emailed around. Presumably this is what the pull request is trying to emulate.
- synack 1y agoYou push a branch and send an email.
- sam_lowry_ 1y agoSomeone even made a simple walkthrough: https://git-send-email.io/ https://git-send-email.io/
- Aurornis 1y agoThe anti-UI people want to use e-mail and command line tools. It’s not a direct equivalent to pull requests because it lacks all of the easy history, inline commenting, comment status tracking, and ease of use, among other things.
- ozornin 1y agohttps://codeberg.org https://codeberg.org
- whalesalad 1y agocan someone with lore knowledge share the deal between gitea, forgejo and codeberg
- woodrowbarlow 1y agogitea is the OG. forgejo is a fork, focused on lower resource needs (i think?). codeberg uses forgejo and adds static-site generation (like github pages) and CI/CD (via woodpecker).
- bananapub 1y agogogs existed, gitea forked from it, gitea made some corporate structure change some people didn't like, they forked forgejo, codeberg is a hosted instance of forgejo.
- kbolino 1y agoIt actually starts with Gogs. Gogs is FOSS but basically BDFL. What does and does not make it into Gogs (it's still around) is ultimately decided by one person, and he's fairly conservative. Gogs is very fast but lacks a lot of features that would allow it to go head-to-head with GitHub or Gitlab. So, Gitea was forked from Gogs to allow it to take a different direction, with a larger group of maintainers and more input from the user community. There were two major attempts to have hosted Gitea. The first was Codeberg, a nonprofit based in the EU. The second is a business that took the name Gitea, is based in the US, and changed Gitea (the software) to the "open core, closed premium" model. This change led to the creation of the Forgejo fork, which Codeberg adopted.
- yakattak 1y agoDo you use their actions at all?
- Catbert59 1y agoPrivate stuff: gitea on a cheap VPS. Will most likly migrate for Forgejo in the future. That stuff runs on a toaster. Public projects: Github. Having no problem with it. Also makes me happy poisoning LLMs with my shitty code.
- lokimedes 1y agoI run Gitea on my old Synology NAS, fast as a devil, especially when compared to Gitlab.
- aspbee555 1y agoI have been using local hosted gitea for years for all private projects
- moksha256 1y agoTo me the biggest not-easily-replaceable value is the "Hub" part of GitHub. It's easy enough to stand up your own Gitea or Forgejo instance for mirroring personal Git repos, set up your own GitLab instance for more sophisticated collaboration and CI workflows, etc...but the discoverability GitHub provides in its current form, since the vast majority of repos are hosted there (or at least have some kind of mirror there) is unparalleled.
- echelon 1y agoIt's 100% the network, not the tech. You can have 1:1 parity with any company or product, but unless you have their word of mouth distribution and adoption, you will lose. Every time. People in aggregate, as crowds, are relatively static and inflexible. Once they learn a fact once, it sticks. You cannot unteach that without lifting metaphorical mountains. The first mover with escape velocity wins. The amount of energy needed to undo that is massive. You'll have fringe 0.01%ers adopt some other tool, but they'll never carry enough gravitas to bring the entire network with them. Anecdotal evidence: - Github, Facebook, and Reddit have never been unseated - Instagram has never been replaced, only supplemented - Twitter/X has only lost steam due to extremely bad press, an unwanted name change, and a huge effort from Meta (which leveraged traffic and synergy from Instagram). And even then, it's still well within the public zeitgeist. Bluesky and Mastodon didn't even make dents. - Google has never been displaced (granted, Google pays a lot of money to maintain defaults and maintain a web "pane of glass" monopoly, redefine the address bar as a search bar, etc.)
- freeopinion 1y agoWhy should Github, Facebook, Reddit, or anybody else be unseated. Just because I use Codeberg doesn't mean Github should die. Just because I never ever visit Facebook doesn't mean you should stop using it. Why can't we all just play nice?
- echelon 1y ago> Why This is why VCs won't fund consumer. It's frothy, fickle, and the incumbents have saturated the network effects market. And that totally sucks. I'm a believer in strong antitrust and that a fire every decade or so clears the forest of dead growth and renews the ecosystem. Evolution and reinvention staves off ossification. Instead of working on hyper-optimization of things like better ad targeting in search of more growth, we're working on more important problems and lifting bigger weights. More startups means better compensation for ICs and innovators. Rewards for capital risk rather than extremely large wealth funds and pension plans. Look at your Fords and Boeings. Totally stagnant. Newer international competition is refreshing and energized. Or Google of just two years ago, before they had their "come to Jesus" moment. Where they witnessed visions of the loss of their single largest cash flow flashing before their eyes.
- nerdypepper 1y agothe only thing I really miss from GitHub is the social bits. it's super easy to stand up cgit etc. but you miss out on actual collab features, discover etc. I've moved the bulk of my repos from GitHub to cgit first, but now to https://tangled.sh https://tangled.sh.
- cryo 1y agoFor personal projects: GIT barebone repositories + Wireguard to access them from all my devices. OSS work is mirrored to Codeberg and SourceHut. For actions I try to make sure that local builds, and cross compilation to Windows, macOS, armhf and arm64, is always working to not soley depend on Github Actions.
- doubled112 1y agoI don't have any public repos, but for private repos, I started with Gogs on a server at home, migrated to Gitea, and finally migrated to Forgejo.
- icy 1y agohttps://tangled.sh https://tangled.sh is an atproto (same tech as Bluesky) git collaboration platform. https://blog.tangled.sh/intro https://blog.tangled.sh/intro We have a more advanced PR flow (stacking, round-based reviews), jujutsu support and we just launched our new CI system. Come join! https://tangled.sh/signup https://tangled.sh/signup. The goal is to be the new town square for collaborating with friends and open source communities. It's built fully in the open (https://tangled.sh/@tangled.sh/core https://tangled.sh/@tangled.sh/core) and we have a neat little community built around it on our Discord https://chat.tangled.sh https://chat.tangled.sh. Last night was a ton of fun with the sudden influx of users thanks to the GitHub news. :)
- mozzius 1y agothis is the only one really gunning for the “hub” part of github, very exciting stuff
- icapybara 1y agoI like the design of your site. Loads very fast, looks clean.
- icy 1y agoThanks! Excellent site-wide performance is something we aim for -- hence our stack of Go + htmx!
- cryo 1y agoDo I miss something? The site only shows a stream but nothing to describe or show the project.
- icy 1y agoThat's the global timeline. If you'd like to look at a demo repositoy https://tangled.sh/@tangled.sh/core https://tangled.sh/@tangled.sh/core is a good one (monorepo for Tangled).
- 1y ago
- gitprolinux 1y ago[dead]
- bradley13 1y agoPersonally, GitLab. Really, though, use anything that is not part of the Microsoft behemoth.
- GavCo 1y agodefinitely the best alternative in terms of DX
- osmsucks 1y agoFor personal projects, I'm hosting them on <https://git.disroot.org/ https://git.disroot.org/>. It's backed by Forgejo, and for my simple needs it's plenty.
- stefanka 1y agoDoes this work for private/closed source project? Where are the servers located and how is it financed?
- osmsucks 1y agoYes, practically all of my projects are private and visible only to me. Servers IIRC are located in the Netherlands. It's free to use with limitations, and financed by donations from supporters. More: - Annual financial reports: https://disroot.org/annual_reports - Someone's review: https://proprivacy.com/email/review/disroot
- stefanka 1y agoThis should be listed on European-alternatives.eu. I was just looking for something similar with little success. Thanks for sharing.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoAt work we use Azure DevOps ;-;
- stackskipton 1y agoI use Azure DevOps for personal stuff since it provides private repos and free pipelines. It works well enough if you are do not need publicly show off work.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoI crave for PR stacking
- sevenseacat 1y agoI've wanted to build a decent one since before GitHub even existed. Maybe today's news will be the impetus I finally need to start it.
- acqbu 1y agoCodeberg
- jmclnx 1y agoI work on my local Linux system and that is the most update to date Committed items are stored in 2 places: 1. anon ftp on sdf, back to using tar files via gopher, the main site 2. gitlab is a mirror and will make it easier for youngsters. FWIW, I find gitlab easier than github. If gitlab starts going the way github did, I will delete my items on gitlab like I did on github a long time ago.
- abound 1y agoMy general rule of thumb: - GitHub for things I expect broad collaboration on - SourceHut for things I just want to share (or expect contributions from a specific group that are comfortable with email git flows) - Self-hosted for everything else. This used to be Gitea, but I've recently switched to charmbracelet/soft-serve, which fits my needs well (it's small and comparatively simple) As other folks have noted, the social features of GitHub are hard to replicate elsewhere, but I've enjoyed SourceHut's stripped back approach.
- znpy 1y agoI love gitlab.
- zabzonk 1y agoI loved Mercurial (still do), and despite all the bad news, Google Code. And despite even more bad-mouthing, BitBucket.
- JohnKemeny 1y agoSee also: Where should I host software for individual papers in 2025 now that GitHub is part of Microsoft AI? @ academia.sx https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/220795/where-should-i-host-software-for-individual-papers-in-2025-now-that-github-is-pa https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/220795/where-sh...
- smjburton 1y agoSelf-hosted Forgejo with Forgejo Actions for CI/CD. Forgejo Actions uses a syntax similar to GitHub Actions, so it's easy to transition. For my projects, I haven't had any issues. I'd suggest setting up an instance and testing it out to see if works with your projects/workflow as a replacement for GitHub/GitHub Actions.
- yodon 1y agoTo the people who say "GitHub for public projects, gitea (or whatever) for private projects," can I ask why? If you're using GitHub for your public projects, why not just use GitHub period? Genuine question here.
- 000ooo000 1y agoTo speculate, a lot of devs seem to have a 'not GitHub? Ew..' attitude. Having used the top 4 forges professionally (BB, GL, GH, AZD) I am the opposite, so I run Forgejo at home. I don't have public projects though.
- Rendello 1y agoI did for many years, now I just feel a sense of revulsion to the AI AI AI marketing. Apparently they don't train on private code, so perhaps that feeling isn't logical, but it remains for me regardless.
- busterarm 1y agoSourcehut.
- Sunspark 1y agoJust like bots trawl the web to train AIs with, why would using different code sites be any different? If it's visible, they will still show up and scarf down the code for training material.. So, given that this will happen everywhere, does it really make a difference what MS does?
- 0xbadcafebee 1y agoI don't know why nobody has yet said "GitLab", but it's easily the most feature-rich GitHub alternative (and self-hostable if you need that, but if you don't, why not let them pay the hosting bill for you).
- sam_lowry_ 1y agogit. No, really.
- sprybear 1y agoWas on GitLab, then I lost my 2FA and recovery codes. Pro move. Still browsing. https://radicle.xyz https://radicle.xyz looking rad, though.
- freeopinion 1y agoradicle delegates are interesting.
- grayhatter 1y agoI'm using srctree https://srctree.gr.ht/repo/srctree https://srctree.gr.ht/repo/srctree Hopefully you'll forgive me for shilling my own project. It's a source code sharing site with a few primary goals. First, don't break the back button. I started the project right around the time github broke too many critical features in short succession. The back button, the URL bar, and ctrl+f in the code view. I also want it to be easy to use as a federated collaboration tool. Ideally you'd start your own instance locally, get a familiar GitHub like interface for submitting patches anywhere, even by email. Or if you're hosting a project, you could have an always up instance that others could connect to. The part I've been thinking about deeply the past few days is how to improve the discoverability of peer repos and forks. I want to create something github like in terms of collaboration, but also try to incorporate some of the best lessons from mailing list based repos where it's easy to grab and try patchsets (exposed as branches) from a 'fork' without losing the value of a cannon 'upstream' and without insisting that any specific upstream is where every single commit belongs. The whole thing is written in zig without any dependencies other than git for some of the repo management features I haven't ported yet. (and for generating git blames) If you do use it, or notice any issues, or think it's missing features do let me know. I'm currently trying to decide which is the next most important thing to hack on :) see also https://github.com/GrayHatter/srctree https://github.com/GrayHatter/srctree if you want to subscribe to updates (still a feature srctree lacks lol)
- digdugdirk 1y agoIs Fossil able to step into the limelight yet? I've always been fascinated by it, but it seems to be completely out of the limelight.
- kitd 1y agoYou can run Fossil a a standalone server, yes. https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/server/ https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/server/
- AlphaGeekZulu 1y agoSelf-hosted GitLab for proprietary customer projects that I don’t want in the cloud. I don’t trust GitHub’s privacy promises — if only because of the risk of my own misconfiguration. The GitLab server runs on Ubuntu Server on a NUC and is accessed via Tailscale by our very small team. No need to make it visible to the outside world. Slow, simple, inexpensive, safe, and good enough.
- ac130kz 1y agoGitlab is an easy way to scale things related to code. There's also this new thing Radicle.
- geor9e 1y agoAll of my code is in a synology drive folder (think Dropbox, but hosted on a NAS) with continuous backup and local git in the folders. I'm the only person who works on it, so it's been fine.
- benterix 1y agoGood old Gitlab. There is just one con: its requirements. All the rest basically guarantees that whatever feature you might need, it will be there.
- toastercat 1y ago+1 to Codeberg, seems like it is the best combination of familiarity and longevity. Forgejo Actions still seems incomplete, but its Woodpecker CI seems a little more mature from what I can tell. Definitely not as fleshed out as Github Actions -- a good alternative would be to mirror your repos that require Github Actions to Github, but otherwise keep repos on Codeberg.
- gitlinuxgreat 1y ago[dead]
- srhtftw 1y agoI use SourceHut¹ to serve git for a few private projects. I wanted to use their pages service as well to serve an SPA but their https://srht.site/limitations https://srht.site/limitations prevent SPAs from contacting external services I need. I get why they do that but I need my SPA to let users login to their databases and there's simply no way to do that while adhering to SourceHut's policy. Fortunately pico.sh², codeberg³ and GitLab⁴ (not GitHub) don't have that restriction. I experimented with each of them last year. All of them worked reasonably well. Eventually I settled on GitLab which had the nicest CI/CD of the three at the time. ¹- https://sr.ht https://sr.ht ²- https://pico.sh https://pico.sh ³- https://codeberg.org https://codeberg.org ⁴- https://gitlab.com https://gitlab.com
- rickydroll 1y agogitea and jj. We are using Gitea because of contractual requirements by different clients. I think that cloud-based Git services are fine for projects where you are unwilling or unable to invest in necessary security measures.
- citrusx 1y agoI'm finding that Bitbucket works well enough for my needs. It's CI is kind of an acquired taste, but once you hammer it into shape, it'll do what you need.
- g0db1t 1y ago[dead]
- slowlab 1y agoI self-host Gitea mainly to manage repositories where I try out different libraries and frameworks. Over time, I ended up with a bunch of xxxx-example repos on GitHub, and using Gitea has helped me keep things more organized.
- dakoosha 1y ago[dead]
- mejutoco 1y agogit —bare init on a server with ssh access