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Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#101

https://tangled.sh

How easy is it to set up and run this for private repos?

It looks like it has so many cool features -- stacked PRs, jujutsu support, CI in Nix VMs. But I've never tried it because it sounds like (at least by default) it's some sort of decentralized, peer-to-peer public thing

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#102
post #72

I self host Forgejo on a cheap VPS with hourly borg backups to rsync.net. It's a great system and seems comparable to github, although I'm not a heavy user of actions on either platform. I do use the container registry though. It was a smooth transition and easy to install. I used the docker installation method. Forgejo is great if you don't mind hosting yourself.

You may consider dsci as its ci is baked in and it uses general programming languages directly as the first class citizens

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#103
post #37

To all of those proposing self-hosted GitLab: we did it for 6+ years in my company, and it's not always a smooth sailing. We had our own runners and we made it auto-upgrade across docker images daily before business start. It mostly worked really well, except those few times were a Docker upgrade had to be rolled back, or that one time the bundled pg_shared_buffers was set at 1MB by default, making schema upgrades im…

I'd also say that gitlab runners are the biggest failure point in gitlab and take some work to micro-manage. If I was setting up from scratch I would consider gitlab for source control, but some hosted service for CI

Maybe give https://rocketrunner.io a try? We made super easy and fully managed GitLab CI/CD runners for GitLab.com or self-hosted GitLab servers :-)

(Sorry for posting this twice, but we'd really love to get more user feedback)

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#104
post #47

I strongly disagree with the assumption that GitHub's alternative is another centralized forge. Git itself is perfectly decentralized, as was the original Linux kernel development process. How people managed to put all their eggs in one intermittently available service is beyond me. Moving the eggs into another bucket is not a solution (like Microsoft is short of servers). The SPoF is the problem. There are plumbing,…

Oh, it’s really simple why this happened:

1. People do not like email-based patch processes.

2. GitHub made everything dead simple, and free. Lots of Open Source projects have flourished because GitHub is both easy to use and makes collaboration across repository painless.

3. Very few people actually care about decentralization. As long as you have a full copy of your repo on your own machines as well as GH, it’s hard to argue you’re gaining anything with decentralization.

4. Most people also don’t want to self host a git server.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#105
post #45

A big thing with Github its the unified functionality across most of the OSS world - that we can search across all projects, leverage pipeline actions from other projects, and easily have a single dashboard for our own contributions and interests across all projects. I'd hate to see a move to forge balkanization lose this functionality. But this would not be heavyweight data to federate. So are there any forges with…

There was some work to address this issue with federation in Gitea, but I haven't kept up with how well that went. Our practical solution was to just mirror our Gitea repos into GitHub. That way they're discoverable, releases can be downloaded, and so on. Not a perfect solution because users get confused as to why they can't open issues, etc.

I was one of the members who was a part of the initial grant for federation in Gitea, but sadly due to illness and other similar neither I nor my teammate were able to work on the grant (so no funding ended up being released), however the work we did start was completed, and we have continued to work on foundations since. Since spam/moderation/limitations are so significant we are focused on that portion first, since we don't want to open up another vector for it without having at least the minimum of protections in place. We have also been extremely fortunate to have experienced developers who do work on existing federated software share so much of their time, expertise, and experiences with us to help shape our work.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#106
post #99

If only there was a convention for storing PRs and issues and wiki inside the repository itself, similar to how Fossil[1] does it. Then all the GitHubs and Gitlabs of this world would be limited to just providing UI and would be unable to hold our data hostage by design. [1] https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

I started using fossil recently and have been quite pleased with this aspect of it. I miss a few things from the git world (mostly magit and its magical ability to stage individual hunks of a diff) and there are a few rough edges, but I totally agree that having a wiki and issue tracking inside the repository makes so much sense. fossil‘s simplicity is a breath of fresh air for anyone who has to use git from a CLI. W…

The workflow is paradigmically different, and that may throw many people off.

There's no rebase, on principle. Branch names are permanent attributes of commits. Even abandoned branches remain visible forever. Code review is post-hoc.

People who are extremely accustomed to Git workflows may find the paradigm alienating.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#108
Whatever you do, you should self-host it. Then you aren't going to be at the mercy of some third party when they start to get hammered by vibe coders doing an insane amount of traffic. Forgejo is a great option if you want something git-based. I'm personally very partial to Fossil, it works well and is dead easy to set up.
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