A deep dive into my Forgejo setup

Summary

Like many others recently I got fed up by what seems to be a steady and inexorable degradation of GitHub quality of service (more on that later) and decided to walk down the self host path for all my things Git, Docker, PRs and CI/CD. In this article I’m going to show you with some level of detail how my new self hosted Forgejo1 setup currently looks like and how well it fits me as a near total replacement for GitHub (spoilers ahead: very well). I’ll provide links to actual repositories plus snippets of reusable configuration in case you might want to try it for yourself. Why Forgejo# To be honest I didn’t spend much time selecting which OpenSource git forge to adopt. I heard well about other options like SourceHut for example BUT I already had a Codeberg (the company behind Forgejo development) account and I like their mission it exposes most of GitHub APIs verbatim so things like GitHub actions should work out of the box it’s feature rich, considered stable and follows a regular release cycle the UI is almost identical to GitHub’s it’s written in Go, I like Go Not exhaustive and much for an heuristic, I suppose, but has been enough for me. How it looks like# The forge is live at https://forge.l3x.in and is already home for a few of my OpenSource projects and all of my private repositories, with plans to migrate there most of the others I currently have on GitHub (more on that later). Everything so far works pretty well: the web UI feels familiar and snappy, migrating / mirroring repos is just a click away, and CI/CD latency and build times are fantastic ⚡️ Just a quick comparison from a single project involving Docker (Podman) build to prove the point: Almost 18 minutes saved for building (and pushing to registry) the very same application, not to mention from now on I won’t have to wait for my turn in the GH build queue. This win alone might have been worth the effort, I’ll expand on what works better than on GitHub and what not later on but let’s get into some t...