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Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

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171–180 of 468 posts

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#171
post #115

https://tangled.org ! Founder/CEO here. We're a new forge building things from the ground up, and are fully federated -- you can host your git repos on your own infra, along with the CI runners. We've also got a pretty neat set of features (if I may say so myself): stacked PRs, Nix-based CI (if you want it), and a fully open protocol ( https://atproto.com ) to for you and your agents. Happy to answer any questions.

I think the main thing I'm waiting for in the atproto space, for _most_ applications, is private data solutions. And the recent RFC on private data spaces (I forget the terminology) is a start, but has a ways to go.

Yeah I would like to try Tangled if I can set it up in a completely private configuration

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#172
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…

> To all of those proposing self-hosted GitLab: ... it's not always a smooth sailing.

> (we pinned to major afterwards)

I mean OK. But also, if I want a reliable service in my business, I wouldn't typically auto-upgrade docker images nightly to "*".

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#174
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does sourcehut still require patches via email instead of "pull requests"? That was the deal breaker for me last time I looked at it.

> Does sourcehut still require patches via email I'd guess the technically correct answer to this question is "yes". But sourcehut has very good mailing list support, that is essentially equivalent to github pull requests. Still, I find the wording of your question a bit prejudiced... as if I asked "does github still require pull requests via a proprietary interface instead of just sending the patches?"

The specific wording sounded a bit judgy to me as well, but I think it's a totally reasonable question. They're just asking about the capability of a product.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#175
post #134

It depends on what you are after? 1. Do you want something that works and feels like GitHub? -- Forgejo and Gitea are good for this. 2. Do you want a place to host git repositories with minimal hassle? -- GitLab, CodeBerg, and others are available. 3. Do you have your own hosting infrastructure? You could use gitolite and CGit/GitWeb on that hosting platform or local hardware. 4. Do you just want to host repositories…

I'm quite partial to SourceHut as well but tbh I don't care about contributors and I like it because it is deliberately low-tech.

Maybe the CI could be a bit better (secrets management will sting you if you don't read the docs first), but that is also pretty no-nonsense and gets the job done.

If you like no-frills and an expectation that you know what you're doing, it's pretty sweet.

Would probably scare off most collaborators though but that, IMO, is part of the appeal. If you want to contribute then it's more likely you're invested and not driving by.

Also I like that it has a concept of projects so you can group repos together (which on GH would normally require creating an organisation account). And a repo can be public but unlisted, so it's open but not drawing attention.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#176
post #134

It depends on what you are after? 1. Do you want something that works and feels like GitHub? -- Forgejo and Gitea are good for this. 2. Do you want a place to host git repositories with minimal hassle? -- GitLab, CodeBerg, and others are available. 3. Do you have your own hosting infrastructure? You could use gitolite and CGit/GitWeb on that hosting platform or local hardware. 4. Do you just want to host repositories…

Hopefully a good spot to plug my own project, preloop, which is a drop-in replacement of Github actions(both the runners and control plane) that runs locally or self-hosted in isoalted microvms, and supports debug-on-failure. You can also push to the server, run CI and then optionally create a draft PR. Not quite production-ready yet(for the self-hosted part), but the local part works well. We implement the official runner protocol 100% unlike act/gitea/forgejo, so your workflows are more likely to work out of the box with preloop(forgejo has the closest compatibility with Github Actions though so it's a good off-Github option) and we use microvms so no DinD issues. I'm working on getting the official runner vm image up to reduce any environment incompatibilities. Feel free to try it out: https://github.com/preloopdev/preloop

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#177
post #163
post #134

It depends on what you are after? 1. Do you want something that works and feels like GitHub? -- Forgejo and Gitea are good for this. 2. Do you want a place to host git repositories with minimal hassle? -- GitLab, CodeBerg, and others are available. 3. Do you have your own hosting infrastructure? You could use gitolite and CGit/GitWeb on that hosting platform or local hardware. 4. Do you just want to host repositories…

7. Do you want the most contributions? I hate to admit it, but GitHub has a massive community. I’ve personally seen a project leave it and then contributions dropped significantly.

You don't really need GitHub's 'community'

It is mostly all AI agents, bots and spam anyway, not to mention most projects are now vibecoded slop on there.

You're better off going to a different forge or hosting one yourself.

Codeberg has a no LLMs policy which is very attractive for many.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#178
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use any CI/CD you want. The only reason GH is popular is that it's free for public repos. But Forgejo does have a GH like CI/CD. If you really care about good CI/CD then you should try some of the alternatives out and decide what works best for your needs.

What can you recommend?

Hopefully a good spot to plug my own project, preloop, which is a drop-in replacement of Github actions(both the runners and control plane) that runs locally or self-hosted in isoalted microvms, and supports debug-on-failure. You can also push to the server, run CI and then optionally create a draft PR. Not quite production-ready yet(for the self-hosted part), but the local part works well. We implement the official runner protocol 100% unlike act/gitea/forgejo, so your workflows are more likely to work out of the box with preloop(forgejo has the closest compatibility with Github Actions though so it's a good off-Github option) and we use microvms so no DinD issues. I'm working on getting the official runner vm image up to reduce any environment incompatibilities. Feel free to try it out: https://github.com/preloopdev/preloop

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#179

What are people using as alternatives for GitHub Actions specifically these days?

Hopefully a good spot to plug my own project, preloop, which is a drop-in replacement of Github actions(both the runners and control plane) that runs locally or self-hosted in isoalted microvms, and supports debug-on-failure. You can also push to the server, run CI and then optionally create a draft PR. Not quite production-ready yet(for the self-hosted part), but the local part works well. We implement the official runner protocol 100% unlike act/gitea/forgejo, so your workflows are more likely to work out of the box with preloop(forgejo has the closest compatibility with Github Actions though so it's a good off-Github option) and we use microvms so no DinD issues. I'm working on getting the official runner vm image up to reduce any environment incompatibilities. Feel free to try it out: https://github.com/preloopdev/preloop

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#180

If an org is heavily invested in GitHub Actions and GitHub App integrations, is self-hosting GitHub enterprise the only practical option?

Hopefully a good spot to plug my own project, preloop, which is a drop-in replacement of Github actions(both the runners and control plane) that runs locally or self-hosted in isoalted microvms, and supports debug-on-failure. You can also push to the server, run CI and then optionally create a draft PR. Not quite production-ready yet(for the self-hosted part), but the local part works well. We implement the official runner protocol 100% unlike act/gitea/forgejo, so your workflows are more likely to work out of the box with preloop(forgejo has the closest compatibility with Github Actions though so it's a good off-Github option) and we use microvms so no DinD issues. I'm working on getting the official runner vm image up to reduce any environment incompatibilities. Feel free to try it out: https://github.com/preloopdev/preloop
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