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Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub Actions, GitHub Auth, any hard coded GitHub URLs you use, GitHub's nice REST API. They do have a bunch of value adds, it just depends on which you use

gitea/forgejo both do an 80% job of covering these needs, ime. they have mostly-GH-compatible APIs.

are you a paying customer?

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#352

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…

I've sorta overlooked Fossil a lot (mostly because it's not git...), but just browsing some instances on chisel and the fossil homepage has me intrigued.

If you'll entertain me for a moment...

My dream "forge" would just be nice-looking frontend for displaying repos on the web, a public issue tracker (with per-issue permissions), a public way to submit issues, and essentially a single canonical root for repositories that users on the team work on. I don't want individual user repos or pages, organizations, or any social stuff. I definitely don't want open registration.

It really looks like fossil is actually what I've always wanted.

How limiting is the custom theme support? It looks like you can just straight up write your own HTML/CSS for everything. If I really want a custom design, will I be disappointed in the long run?

Also, it looks like it follows that user model I want, where it's "repositories with users" instead of "users with repositories". Is that correct?

And here I was trying to hype myself up to write my own git web frontend.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4. Do you just want to host repositories? an ssh connection and git --bare init on your ssh accessible server works just fine

“Just” is a four letter word and a trap our industry repeatedly falls into. https://sgringwe.com/2019/10/10/Please-just-stop-saying-just

i used to feel the same way, but with coding agents, the Justers are surely having the last laugh

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#354
I set up Forgejo on my FreeBSD home server the other week, it's been working fantastically. All the features I need, snappy, easy to install.

I think ultimately any company that goes this route will start benefiting from an IT team again though - instead of just pushing everything off to SAAS providers.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#355
We switched our entire product studio to a self hosted Forgejo https://forgejo.org/ and honestly this has been one of our best decisions:

it's fast, has a great API for bots and automations to use, just a Go project so we've been able to make some tweaks to the runner. Very easy to setup and admin

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#356
post #55

I migrated everything to codeberg several months ago (and created an annual donation schedule). I was never a big fan of github but what ultimately pushed me to ditch it was the way github was shoving copilot/chatgpt in my face without me ever asking. Codeberg has a clear stance on that and it's a stance I can totally get behind. In addition I spun up forgejo at a server at home for very critical stuff and it's aweso…

Note: if your reason for switching is purely uptime, you will be sorely disappointed with codeberg Their own site reports the 2 week uptime at 1 nine https://status.codeberg.org/status/codeberg and I suspect if you use the (really terrible) across-all-product-offerings uptime methodology that people love to post for github it would be a 0 nines overall service.

> Their own site reports the 2 week uptime at 1 nine

If you look at github's uptime for that past 24 hours they're way below 1 nine.

In all seriousness, the amount of time you amortize over matters - if you look at the status account here https://social.anoxinon.de/@codebergstatus the downtime is not bad overall even though recently it was rough.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 "*".

> I mean OK. But also, if I want a reliable service in my business, I wouldn't typically auto-upgrade docker images nightly to "*". Well fair, but we had been using it for 4+y at the time before running into that, and the rails-based migration scripts basically never failed once despite being migrated across 6 majors and countless minors/patches. Being a small company, from that PoV it gave us very little downtime fo…

4 years of running production GitLab on nightly is very impressive! I would never have imagined you could last that long. Clearly the quality of GitLab releases is much higher than I imagined.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#359

I answered this in another thread, if you're already running a large GitHub organization, GitLab is the closest alternative in terms of features A big plus is that it also has an open-source Community Edition that you can self-host

There are also many consultancies able to provide professional support with running it in your org, including migrations.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#360

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

You could ask a quote from consultants on how much it would cost to migrate them... For large corporations it will probably be millions of euros.
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