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I've been on a somewhat binge to move a bunch of stuff to self-hosting at home. Yesterday I finally completed my self-hosted Forgejo instance at home, together

I've been on a somewhat binge to move a bunch of stuff to self-hosting at home. Yesterday I finally completed my self-hosted Forgejo instance at home, together with Linux, Windows (via VM) and macOS (via Mac Mini) runners/workers for CI/CD, so everything finally lives in-house (literally), instead of all source code + Actions being on GitHub but the infrastructure actually living locally. This is probably the first time I felt vindicated with my self-hosting move literally the day after I finished the migration, very pleasant feeling. Usually it takes a month or two before I get here.

shevy-java 6mo ago
Interesting. I speculated not long ago that Microsoft is really taking a dive here, and other companies may look to provide better alternatives to GitHub, as one idea. Today I read your comment about self-hosting here; while that is not quite what I compared or had in mind, it is interesting to read about it, of people who go that route. Microsoft is really putting themselves into trouble in the last year or two. Some things no longer work, so much is clear here.
yakattak 6mo ago
I moved my forge to my home, outside of a little stress getting all the containers wrangled it was pretty effortless to setup Forgejo. I do need a good backup solution though, that’s one thing I’m missing.
- TranquilMarmot 6mo ago
  I use https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest to manage nightly encrypted backups of my Forgejo instance to a Hetzner Storage Box. <$4/mo for 500GB of storage. It's also where I back up my Immich library to. Immich automatically dumps its DB every day, for Forgejo I have a little script that runs as part of the Backrest backup that does a pgdumb of the database before doing the backup. It works great, I even had to do disaster recovery on it once and it went smooth.
- lone-cloud 6mo ago
  I use rclone + backblaze. You get 10GB for free which is more than enough for self-hosted stuff.
lisplist 6mo ago
The only problem I've found with Forgejo is a lack of fine grained permissions and also the lack of an API for pulling action invocations. The actions log api endpoints are present in gitea from what I can tell.
- mfenniak 6mo ago
  Forgejo 15 was just released last week with repo-specific access tokens. More to come in the future.
cedws 6mo ago
The idea of a homelab is appealing to me, but then I actually start building one and get tired of it quickly. When I’ve been fixing broken systems at work all day I don’t really want to have to be my own sysadmin too. I’ve got a nice and powerful Minisforum on my desk that I bought at Christmas not even switched on.
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  I've tried for 15 years to have my homelab, but always get lost in the complexity after a year or so, in the past. About 3 years ago I gave NixOS a try instead for managing everything, which suddenly made everything easier (counter-intuitively perhaps) as now I can come back after months and still understand where everything is and how it works after just reading. Setting up Forgejo + runners declaratively is probably ~100 lines in total, and doesn't matter I forget how it works, just have to spend five minutes reading to catch up after I come back in 6 months to change/fix something. I think the trick to avoid getting tired of it is trying to just make it as simple as humanly possible. The less stuff you have, the easier it gets, at least that's intuitive :)
  - cedws 6mo ago
    Thanks. Yeah, I've probably been overcomplicating it before. I was running Kubernetes on Talos thinking that at least it would be familiar. Such power tools for running simple workloads on a single node is inviting headaches.
  - dml2135 6mo ago
    Yup this is what I've got up and running recently and it's been awesome. My setup is roughly the following. - Dell optiplex mini running Proxmox for compute. Unraid NAS for storage. - Debian VM on the Proxmox machine running Forgejo and Komodo for container management. - Monorepo in Forgejo for the homelab infrastructure. This lets me give Claude access to just the monorepo on my local machine to help me build stuff out, without needing to give it direct access to any of my actual servers. - Claude helps me build out deployment pipeline for VMs/containers in Forgejo actions, which looks like: - Forgejo runner creates NixOS builds => Deploy VMs via Proxmox API => Deploy containers via Komodo API - I've got separate VMs for - gateway for reverse-proxy & authentication - monitoring with prometheus/loki/grafana stack - general use applications Since storage is external with NFS shares, I can tear down and rebuild the VMs whenever I need to redeploy something. All of my docker compose files and nix configs live in the monorepo on Forgejo, so I can use Renovate to keep everything up to date. Plan files, kanban board, and general documentation live adjacent to Nix and Docker configs in the monorepo, so Claude has all the context it needs to get things done. I did this because I got tired of using Docker templates on Unraid. They were a great way to get started, but it's hard to pin container versions and still keep them up-to-date (Unraid relies heavily on the `latest` tag). Moving stuff over to this setup bit-by-bit and I've been really enjoying it so far.
neilv 6mo ago
I self-host Forgejo for personal and indie-startup purposes, and like it well enough. The downside with that is it misses one of the key purposes of GitHub: posturing for job-hunting/hopping. It's another performative checkbox, like memorizing Leetcode and practicing delivery for brogrammer interviews. If you don't appear active on GitHub specifically (not even Codeberg, GitLab, nor something else), you're going to get dismissed from a lot of job applications, with "do you even lift, bro" style dissing, from people who have very simple conceptions of what software engineers do, and why.
- radlad 6mo ago
  There is a fairly straightforward feature in Forgejo to sync your repos to Github, if that's what you want to do. It's not perfect, of course, but should help to advertise your projects and keep your activity heatmap green. I mostly use Forgejo for my private repos, which are free at Github, but with many limitations. One month I burned all my private CI tokens on the 1st due to a hung Mac runner. Love not having to worry about this now!
  - nextaccountic 6mo ago
    or you can just have two remotes and push to both sites and enjoy git's distributed nature
    - TranquilMarmot 6mo ago
      I do this, but beware if you have LFS files. You can easily get into weird states with LFS pushing up to two different remotes and it's really not fun to fix.
- gill-bates 6mo ago
  I get that. To counter it I usually try to have at least one public repo on my Forgejo instance and link to that on my resume/LinkedIn. It helps that I'm angling for security/infra positions so the self-hosting aspect actually helps but even without that I would imagine it signals something. Maybe not ideal for the most mainstream jobs (whatever that even means...), but I suspect some people will be intrigued by the initiative. Edit: to the "do you even lift bro", the response becomes "yeah man, I've built my own gym - oh, you go to Planet Fitness? Good luck."
radlad 6mo ago
I recently did this as well and one of the things that has struck me is just how fast Actions are compared to Github! That said, I've got Linux and macOS setup with a Mac Mini (using a Claude-generated Ansible task file), but configuring a Windows VM seemed a bit painful. You didn't happen to find anything to simplify the deployment process here, did you?
- embedding-shape 6mo ago
  > You didn't happen to find anything to simplify the deployment process here, did you? No, unfortunately not, the Windows VM setup + Forgejo Windows runner was the most painful thing for me to setup, no doubt. It's just such a hassle to reliably set things up, even getting logs out of it was trouble... To be fair, my Mac Mini was manually setup at first, then I have Nix on top of it, while Windows I've 100% automated it, so not entirely fair comparison, automating the Mac Mini setup would be similarly harsh I think. But it's a mix-match of Nix for configuring the VM and booting it, XML files for "autounattend" setup, ps1 bootstrapping scripts and .cmd script for finalizing, a big mess.
colechristensen 6mo ago
Instability aside I found several things about GitHub awkward, annoying, or missing features so I spent a month building my own. I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of this.
rvz 6mo ago
Self hosting was the correct solution. 6 years early [0] and you have better uptime than GitHub. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803
dietr1ch 6mo ago
My Raspberries (and OrangePi) have better availability than github, and if were to be down I'd be out of power/internet and wouldn't be able to work much anyway.
koyote 6mo ago
And once you start self-hosting, you realise how slow the 'modern' web actually is. I host forgejo on a single NUC with a bunch of other stuff in Proxmox, the page loads in 6ms! Immich is not quite as fast but still a ton faster than Google photos.
- oefrha 6mo ago
  That’s not a given. Self-hosted GitLab on my pretty good hardware is still slow. I just opened a very small repo with ~20 files and ~5 commits. The page spun for 5s+ before showing me the directory listing and readme. Subsequent loads are faster (~1s) but still not instant.
  - koyote 6mo ago
    GitLab is what drove me to forgejo, it just became unsustainably slow.
snailmailman 6mo ago
I've been running my own private forgejo instance for a while now. I host all my own private side projects and stuff there. Its a much more pleasant experience than github, if only because it has higher than 90% uptime. The UI is mostly identical otherwise. The number of consistent issues i've had with anything github-related lately is crazy. Even just browsing their site is difficult sometimes with slow loads that often just hang entirely.
lone-cloud 6mo ago
Are you me? Somebody was talking about gitea on here yesterday and I also ended up self-hosting and moving all of my private projects to Ferjero yesterday after a bit of research. I can't bring myself to move public projects due to job prospects + GitHub network effect. Otherwise I'm role playing as a system admin now with 20 local services for various things I need. I think the most important thing is to have regular backups as you're now in charge of keeping your data from getting lost.
estimator7292 6mo ago
My GitLab server at home is so nice. My last job ran a self-hosted GitLab on AWS with CI runners on-prem, which was a delight to work with. New job runs on GitHub. I frequently have to stop work and wait for GitHub to recover before I can checkout some dependency or push a commit. It's outrageous.

shevy-java 6mo ago

Interesting. I speculated not long ago that Microsoft is really taking a dive here, and other companies may look to provide better alternatives to GitHub, as one idea. Today I read your comment about self-hosting here; while that is not quite what I compared or had in mind, it is interesting to read about it, of people who go that route. Microsoft is really putting themselves into trouble in the last year or two. Some things no longer work, so much is clear here.

yakattak 6mo ago

I moved my forge to my home, outside of a little stress getting all the containers wrangled it was pretty effortless to setup Forgejo. I do need a good backup solution though, that’s one thing I’m missing.

TranquilMarmot 6mo ago
I use https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest to manage nightly encrypted backups of my Forgejo instance to a Hetzner Storage Box. <$4/mo for 500GB of storage. It's also where I back up my Immich library to. Immich automatically dumps its DB every day, for Forgejo I have a little script that runs as part of the Backrest backup that does a pgdumb of the database before doing the backup. It works great, I even had to do disaster recovery on it once and it went smooth.
lone-cloud 6mo ago
I use rclone + backblaze. You get 10GB for free which is more than enough for self-hosted stuff.

lisplist 6mo ago

The only problem I've found with Forgejo is a lack of fine grained permissions and also the lack of an API for pulling action invocations. The actions log api endpoints are present in gitea from what I can tell.

mfenniak 6mo ago
Forgejo 15 was just released last week with repo-specific access tokens. More to come in the future.

cedws 6mo ago

The idea of a homelab is appealing to me, but then I actually start building one and get tired of it quickly. When I’ve been fixing broken systems at work all day I don’t really want to have to be my own sysadmin too. I’ve got a nice and powerful Minisforum on my desk that I bought at Christmas not even switched on.

embedding-shape 6mo ago
I've tried for 15 years to have my homelab, but always get lost in the complexity after a year or so, in the past. About 3 years ago I gave NixOS a try instead for managing everything, which suddenly made everything easier (counter-intuitively perhaps) as now I can come back after months and still understand where everything is and how it works after just reading. Setting up Forgejo + runners declaratively is probably ~100 lines in total, and doesn't matter I forget how it works, just have to spend five minutes reading to catch up after I come back in 6 months to change/fix something. I think the trick to avoid getting tired of it is trying to just make it as simple as humanly possible. The less stuff you have, the easier it gets, at least that's intuitive :)
- cedws 6mo ago
  Thanks. Yeah, I've probably been overcomplicating it before. I was running Kubernetes on Talos thinking that at least it would be familiar. Such power tools for running simple workloads on a single node is inviting headaches.
- dml2135 6mo ago
  Yup this is what I've got up and running recently and it's been awesome. My setup is roughly the following. - Dell optiplex mini running Proxmox for compute. Unraid NAS for storage. - Debian VM on the Proxmox machine running Forgejo and Komodo for container management. - Monorepo in Forgejo for the homelab infrastructure. This lets me give Claude access to just the monorepo on my local machine to help me build stuff out, without needing to give it direct access to any of my actual servers. - Claude helps me build out deployment pipeline for VMs/containers in Forgejo actions, which looks like: - Forgejo runner creates NixOS builds => Deploy VMs via Proxmox API => Deploy containers via Komodo API - I've got separate VMs for - gateway for reverse-proxy & authentication - monitoring with prometheus/loki/grafana stack - general use applications Since storage is external with NFS shares, I can tear down and rebuild the VMs whenever I need to redeploy something. All of my docker compose files and nix configs live in the monorepo on Forgejo, so I can use Renovate to keep everything up to date. Plan files, kanban board, and general documentation live adjacent to Nix and Docker configs in the monorepo, so Claude has all the context it needs to get things done. I did this because I got tired of using Docker templates on Unraid. They were a great way to get started, but it's hard to pin container versions and still keep them up-to-date (Unraid relies heavily on the `latest` tag). Moving stuff over to this setup bit-by-bit and I've been really enjoying it so far.

neilv 6mo ago

I self-host Forgejo for personal and indie-startup purposes, and like it well enough. The downside with that is it misses one of the key purposes of GitHub: posturing for job-hunting/hopping. It's another performative checkbox, like memorizing Leetcode and practicing delivery for brogrammer interviews. If you don't appear active on GitHub specifically (not even Codeberg, GitLab, nor something else), you're going to get dismissed from a lot of job applications, with "do you even lift, bro" style dissing, from people who have very simple conceptions of what software engineers do, and why.

radlad 6mo ago
There is a fairly straightforward feature in Forgejo to sync your repos to Github, if that's what you want to do. It's not perfect, of course, but should help to advertise your projects and keep your activity heatmap green. I mostly use Forgejo for my private repos, which are free at Github, but with many limitations. One month I burned all my private CI tokens on the 1st due to a hung Mac runner. Love not having to worry about this now!
- nextaccountic 6mo ago
  or you can just have two remotes and push to both sites and enjoy git's distributed nature
  - TranquilMarmot 6mo ago
    I do this, but beware if you have LFS files. You can easily get into weird states with LFS pushing up to two different remotes and it's really not fun to fix.
gill-bates 6mo ago
I get that. To counter it I usually try to have at least one public repo on my Forgejo instance and link to that on my resume/LinkedIn. It helps that I'm angling for security/infra positions so the self-hosting aspect actually helps but even without that I would imagine it signals something. Maybe not ideal for the most mainstream jobs (whatever that even means...), but I suspect some people will be intrigued by the initiative. Edit: to the "do you even lift bro", the response becomes "yeah man, I've built my own gym - oh, you go to Planet Fitness? Good luck."

radlad 6mo ago

I recently did this as well and one of the things that has struck me is just how fast Actions are compared to Github! That said, I've got Linux and macOS setup with a Mac Mini (using a Claude-generated Ansible task file), but configuring a Windows VM seemed a bit painful. You didn't happen to find anything to simplify the deployment process here, did you?

embedding-shape 6mo ago
> You didn't happen to find anything to simplify the deployment process here, did you? No, unfortunately not, the Windows VM setup + Forgejo Windows runner was the most painful thing for me to setup, no doubt. It's just such a hassle to reliably set things up, even getting logs out of it was trouble... To be fair, my Mac Mini was manually setup at first, then I have Nix on top of it, while Windows I've 100% automated it, so not entirely fair comparison, automating the Mac Mini setup would be similarly harsh I think. But it's a mix-match of Nix for configuring the VM and booting it, XML files for "autounattend" setup, ps1 bootstrapping scripts and .cmd script for finalizing, a big mess.

colechristensen 6mo ago

Instability aside I found several things about GitHub awkward, annoying, or missing features so I spent a month building my own. I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of this.

rvz 6mo ago

Self hosting was the correct solution. 6 years early [0] and you have better uptime than GitHub. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803

dietr1ch 6mo ago

My Raspberries (and OrangePi) have better availability than github, and if were to be down I'd be out of power/internet and wouldn't be able to work much anyway.

koyote 6mo ago

And once you start self-hosting, you realise how slow the 'modern' web actually is. I host forgejo on a single NUC with a bunch of other stuff in Proxmox, the page loads in 6ms! Immich is not quite as fast but still a ton faster than Google photos.

oefrha 6mo ago
That’s not a given. Self-hosted GitLab on my pretty good hardware is still slow. I just opened a very small repo with ~20 files and ~5 commits. The page spun for 5s+ before showing me the directory listing and readme. Subsequent loads are faster (~1s) but still not instant.
- koyote 6mo ago
  GitLab is what drove me to forgejo, it just became unsustainably slow.

snailmailman 6mo ago

I've been running my own private forgejo instance for a while now. I host all my own private side projects and stuff there. Its a much more pleasant experience than github, if only because it has higher than 90% uptime. The UI is mostly identical otherwise. The number of consistent issues i've had with anything github-related lately is crazy. Even just browsing their site is difficult sometimes with slow loads that often just hang entirely.

lone-cloud 6mo ago

Are you me? Somebody was talking about gitea on here yesterday and I also ended up self-hosting and moving all of my private projects to Ferjero yesterday after a bit of research. I can't bring myself to move public projects due to job prospects + GitHub network effect. Otherwise I'm role playing as a system admin now with 20 local services for various things I need. I think the most important thing is to have regular backups as you're now in charge of keeping your data from getting lost.

estimator7292 6mo ago

My GitLab server at home is so nice. My last job ran a self-hosted GitLab on AWS with CI runners on-prem, which was a delight to work with. New job runs on GitHub. I frequently have to stop work and wait for GitHub to recover before I can checkout some dependency or push a commit. It's outrageous.