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Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

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271–280 of 468 posts

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#271
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…

If you want (4) and don't care about a web interface for managing repos, but do want Git-LFS, Soft Serve ( https://github.com/charmbracelet/soft-serve/ ) works pretty well. I used it for self-hosted stuff until I started needing other features Forgejo offers.

Or just push to an S3 bucket with `gitsocial mirror `

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah. MicroVMs make hosting runners pretty straightforward. I had codex make a forgejo runner controller which pulls forgejo actions and creates kubernetes jobs for them. It was a bit of a pain to configure firecracker with k3s. It really can’t be understated how much easier hosting CI is with microvms as the security boundary.

Agree. I'm always surprised Github still uses huge fat VMs. I imagine this is one of the things that make it much painful at scale. The tricky part with microvms are getting them to run cross-platform. We use an awesome project called smolvm that builds on libkrun and makes this alot easier. As an aside, how have forgejo actions worked for you in practice?

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#273

If you are frustrated with Github being down again, and just want an alternative, the other options listed are better fits. If you have the time to look at doing more than that, then check out fossil https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki - It isn't git - Works best with smaller teams - You need to be ok self hosting (single binary, easy to do) The first point is really the killer. It is revision contro…

Fossil looks really cool. I like how it's all in one and includes the web interface. The only thing is it doesn't seem like anyone actually uses it outside of sqlite. I don't necessarily need to use the most popular thing out there, but some social proof is nice.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Looks neat! I'll try your project if you try mine: https://getprobed.chat/

Thanks! Yours looks good too! What would you say is the difference with Slack connect? I find slack connect to be pretty painful once you have n > 50 channels

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#275
post #273

If you are frustrated with Github being down again, and just want an alternative, the other options listed are better fits. If you have the time to look at doing more than that, then check out fossil https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki - It isn't git - Works best with smaller teams - You need to be ok self hosting (single binary, easy to do) The first point is really the killer. It is revision contro…

Fossil looks really cool. I like how it's all in one and includes the web interface. The only thing is it doesn't seem like anyone actually uses it outside of sqlite. I don't necessarily need to use the most popular thing out there, but some social proof is nice.

It is a small community. The forums are moderately active though: https://fossil-scm.org/forum/forum

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#276

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

Epiq also solves this with a git-native backend, so it is vendor agnostic and adheres to a issue-tracking-as-code paradigm. It is therefore distributed, has a TUI + browser GUI, mcp server, and so on.

https://ljtn.github.io/epiq/

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#277

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

Epiq also solves this with a git-native backend, so it is vendor agnostic and adheres to a issue-tracking-as-code paradigm. It is therefore distributed, has a TUI + browser GUI, mcp server, and so on. https://ljtn.github.io/epiq/

It is also event sourced, and supports state replay from beginning to end, so very powerful for auditing workflows, whether that be your own or a swarm of agents.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#278
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…

For issue tracking you may also be interested in Epiq. It is git-native, vendor agnostic, and distributed. Comes with a command line TUI, a browser GUI, mcp, and more. Also event sourced state with replay, which is super powerful for auditing workflows.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#279
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contributions aren't just commits/prs. It's also opening issues. The harder it is to provide feedback, the more likely users are going to seek a different library or tool, and depending on the actual objective of releasing or publishing code, that is not ideal. I do agree on the fly by night agents, especially since so much is actually just agents acting on behalf of folks who just spam whatever permissions are reque…

Don't think open submission feedback is worth much anymore, at least not the amount of effort it requires to curate it. Having friction still seems like a great way to get decent feedback nowadays rather than needing to manually curate 100s of issues where 98% of them are spam/garbage.

That's fine if the projects are in a single place (e.g. GitHub) as you only need to create one account.

If every project requires its own username/password just to report a bug, I may do that for the first 2 or 3, but not for every project. I'm also unlikely to create accounts on hosting platforms I don't intend on using outside of reporting the single bug.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#280

If you are frustrated with Github being down again, and just want an alternative, the other options listed are better fits. If you have the time to look at doing more than that, then check out fossil https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki - It isn't git - Works best with smaller teams - You need to be ok self hosting (single binary, easy to do) The first point is really the killer. It is revision contro…

There's also a hosting service for fossil repos which does a really good job for a number of years now https://chiselapp.com/repositories/
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