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Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

unterwaditzer.net

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Re: Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

#11

Post by woodruffw »

I think evaluating alternatives to GitHub is going to become increasingly important over the coming years. At the same time, I think these kinds of migrations discount how much GitHub has changed the table stakes/raised the bar for what makes a valuable source forge: it's simply no longer reasonable to BYO CI or accept one that can't natively build for a common set of end-user architectures.

This on its own makes me pretty bearish on community-driven attempts to oust GitHub, even if ideologically I'm aligned with them: the real cost (both financial and in terms of complexity) of user expectations around source forges in 2026 is immense.

Re: Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

#12

Post by maccard »

unwoven wrote: post #2

> The by far nastiest part is CI. GitHub has done an excellent job luring people in with free macOS runners and infinite capacity for public repos Yup and this is where I pass on anything other than GitHub.

Agreed - this is also where Github is the most unreliable. our _number one_ reason for build failures is "GHA being down/degraded" in 2026.

Re: Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

#13

Post by 999900000999 »

GitHub gives you a lot for "free". In exchange they'll have no problem harvesting your data, and it would really surprise me if they aren't training on private repos too. I guess you can opt out and if they're opt out doesn't work oh well.

On the other hand Codeberg doesn't let you create private repositories at all. So Copilot could still legally scrape your open source Codeberg repos.

I don't see much of a point for most people. https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/ >If you need private repositories for commercial projects (e.g. because you represent a company or are a developer that needs a space to host private freelance projects for your clients), we would highly recommend that you take a look at Forgejo. Forgejo is the Git hosting software that Codeberg runs. It is free software and relatively easy to self-host. Codeberg does not offer private hosting services.

Re: Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

#14

Post by noirscape »

I don't dislike Codeberg inherently, but it's not a "true" GitHub replacement. It can handle a good chunk of GitHub repositories (namely those for well established FOSS projects looking to have everything a proper capital P project has), but if you're just looking for a generic place to put your code projects that aren't necessarily intended for public release and support (ie. random automation scripts, scraps of concepts that never really got off the ground, things not super cleaned up), they're not really for that - private repositories are discouraged according to their FAQ and are very limited (up to 100mb).

They also don't want to host your homepage, so if GitHub Pages is why you used GitHub, they are not a replacement.

Unfortunately I don't think there's really an answer to that conundrum that doesn't involve just spinning up your own git server and accepting all the operational overhead that comes with it. At least Forgejo (software behind Codeberg) is FOSS, so you can do that and it should cover most of what you need (and while you're in the realm of having a server, a Pages-esque replacement is trivial since you're configuring a webserver anyway.) Maybe Gitlab.com, although I am admittedly unfamiliar with how Gitlab's "main" instance has changed over the years wrt features.

Here's their FAQ on the matter, it's worth a read: https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/

Re: Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

#16

Post by embedding-shape »

INTPenis wrote: post #5

Lazy has nothing to do with it, codeberg simply doesn't work. Most of my friends who use codeberg are staunch cloudflare-opponents, but cloudflare is what keeps Gitlab alive. Fact of life is that they're being attacked non-stop, and need some sort of DDoS filter. Codeberg has that anubis thing now I guess? But they still have downtime, and the worst thing ever for me as a developer is having the urge to code and not…

Maybe I'm too old school, but both GitHub and Codeberg for me are asyncronous "I want to send/share the code somehow", not "my active workspace I require to do work". But reading

> the worst thing ever for me as a developer is having the urge to code and not being able to access my remote.

Makes it seem like GitHub/Codeberg has to be online for you to be able to code, is that really the case? If so, how does that happen, you only edit code directly in the GitHub web UI or how does one end up in that situation?

Re: Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

#17

Post by freedomben »

INTPenis wrote: post #5

Lazy has nothing to do with it, codeberg simply doesn't work. Most of my friends who use codeberg are staunch cloudflare-opponents, but cloudflare is what keeps Gitlab alive. Fact of life is that they're being attacked non-stop, and need some sort of DDoS filter. Codeberg has that anubis thing now I guess? But they still have downtime, and the worst thing ever for me as a developer is having the urge to code and not…

I've had the same experience.

Philosophically I think it's terrible that Cloudflare has become a middleman in a huge and important swath of the internet. As a user, it largely makes my life much worse. It limits my browser, my ability to protect myself via VPNs, etc, and I am just browsing normally, not attacking anything. Pragmatically though, as a webmaster/admin/whatever you want to call it nowadays, Cloudflare is basically a necessity. I've started putting things behind it because if I don't, 99%+ of my traffic is bots, and often bots clearly scanning for vulnerabilities (I run mostly zero PHP sites, yet my traffic logs are often filled with requests like /admin.php and /wp-admin.php and all the wordpress things, and constant crawls from clearly not search engines that download everything and use robots.txt as a guide of what to crawl rather than what not to crawl. I haven't been DDoSed yet, but I've had images and PDFs and things downloaded so many times by these things that it costs me money. For some things where I or my family are the only legitimate users, I can just firewall-cmd all IPs except my own, but even then it's maintenance work I don't want to have to do.

I've tried many of the alternatives, and they often fail even on legitimate usecases. I've been blocked more by the alternatives than I have by Cloudflare, especially that one that does a proof of work. It works about 80% of the time, but that 20% is really, really annoying to the point that when I see that scren pop up I just browse away.

It's really a disheartening state we find ourselves in. I don't think my principles/values have been tested more in the real world than the last few years.

Re: Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

#18

Post by conradev »

unwoven wrote: post #2

> The by far nastiest part is CI. GitHub has done an excellent job luring people in with free macOS runners and infinite capacity for public repos Yup and this is where I pass on anything other than GitHub.

GitHub is free, but the runners are slow and increasingly unreliable.

I use Namespace (https://namespace.so) and I hook it up both to my personal GitHub as well as my personal Forgejo. I’m in the process of moving from the former to the latter!

Re: Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

#19

Post by xeeeeeeeeeeenu »

InitialPhase55 wrote: post #3

Might be more difficult for people with private repos, as I recall Codeberg doesn't like private repos on their platform.

If you have a server, some cheap VPS will suffice, you can host a private git repo there without installing anything. Run this on your server:

     git init --bare foo.git
and then on your PC you can do this:

    git clone user@yourserver.com:~/foo.git
It's probably a good idea to make a separate user account on the server for it, though.

Re: Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people

#20

Post by kjuulh »

INTPenis wrote: post #5

Lazy has nothing to do with it, codeberg simply doesn't work. Most of my friends who use codeberg are staunch cloudflare-opponents, but cloudflare is what keeps Gitlab alive. Fact of life is that they're being attacked non-stop, and need some sort of DDoS filter. Codeberg has that anubis thing now I guess? But they still have downtime, and the worst thing ever for me as a developer is having the urge to code and not…

My own git server has been hit severely by scrapers. They're scraping everything. Commits, comparisons between commits, api calls for files, everything.

And pretty much all of them, ByteDance, OpenAI, AWS, Claude, various I couldn't recognize. I basically just had to block all of them to get reasonable performance for a server running on a mini-pc.

I was going to move to codeberg at some point, but they had downtime when I was considering it, I'd rather deal with that myself then.

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