Selfhost your own gitea instance - selfhosted, lightweight github alternative | 4rkal's blog
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In this article I’ll walk you through how you can run your own gitea instance. But first What is gitea? Gitea is a painless selfhosted Git service. It is written in Go and is extremely lightweight. I run a gitea instance on my Le Potato and it barely uses any resources. Why use gitea (vs GitHub, GitLab etc) I started running my own Gitea instance because I wanted a private place to host my Obsidian notes.

I’ve recently set up my own Gitea instance and I figured I’d share a simple guide on how to do it yourself. Hopefully this will be helpful to anyone looking to get started.

If you have any feedback please feel free to comment it bellow.

  • @[email protected]English
    11•4 months ago

    I started running my own Gitea instance because I wanted a private place to host my Obsidian notes.

    I don’t have the time to read the article now, but permit a question: what do you use Gitea for?

    I’m holding my dotfiles on a SSH server, clone/push over SSH, and it’s enough to do Git. I don’t need a ticket system, or wiki or anything (I use plaintext notes).

    $ cat ~/.ssh/config
Host srv
  Hostname srv.mywhatever.com

$ git clone srv:/path/to/repo
$ cd repo
$ git push
    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      2•4 months ago

      Great question

      I always found setting up a git server from scratch to be quite confusing and I also like the webui that gitea offers.

      But recently I have also started moving some of my github projects there so having a link (with a readme and everything) that I can share with others is important.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•4 months ago

        If you have a place to host Forgejo/Gitea, you have a place to store a Git server. Set it up like this:

        $ git clone --bare myrepo myrepo.bare
$ scp -r myrepo.bare srv:
$ cd myrepo
$ git remote add origin srv:myrepo.bare
# or
$ git remote set-url origin srv:myrepo.bare

        Now git push etc work similar to GitHub, but you’re using your server (named srv in SSH config, as shown in my previous post) as the remote storage.

        Selfhosted Gitea is a way to get a wiki, bug tracker or whatnot - collaborate, for example, but it’s not necessary to have a Git server for your personal use.

        • @[email protected]English
          5•4 months ago

          Selfhosted Gitea is a way to get a wiki, bug tracker or whatnot - collaborate, for example, but it’s not necessary to have a Git server for your personal use.

          No, but it is amazing for browsing your repos and visually seeing what you did in a past commit or a branch, while your IDE is open to your latest code. Or copying and pasting something that you need from a different repo.

          For Git experts, sure they can probably do all that better inside their IDE or CLI, but for us plebs, having your own Forgejo is incredible 😍

          I have mine configured to disable the wiki and issues, etc, it’s just the repo browser.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•4 months ago

      I’m hoping federation will allow me to get rid of my github entirely, but that’s wishful thinking I fear