Gitea served me well as my private git forge over at https://git.friedl.net for a long time. Today, I moved over to Forgejo. The migration was as smooth as it gets. It’s pretty much a drop-in replacement at this stage. But that won’t be the case forever! So if you want to switch too, you better do it soon while it’s still smooth.
Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like recently there’s an increasing trend of community and open source projects changing licenses and/or transitioning to a commercial model. A famous case is certainly the license change that Elastic did back in the day. But also CockroachDB and Redis switched to more or less fanfare. There are a lot of reasons for this, and the discussions surrounding them are often emotionally and philosophically charged. While there’s certainly a time and place for delving into these discussion, for now, I simply want to share an observation.
Gitea followed a similar path, though not by changing licenses. Instead, they formed a company and transferred domain and trademark rights to the company. Not everyone in the community agreed to this, and so we ended up with a soft-fork: Forgejo.
The steward of Forgejo is Codeberg e.V, a German non-profit organization. Interestingly enough, I’ve been noticing an increasing number of projects being hosted or mirrored on the Codeberg Forge—yes, Codeberg also hosts a git forge itself. It seems it’s often the kind of projects that used to be found on SourceHut due to philosophical objections to using GitHub. But increasingly also projects that are just looking for some git forge to host their projects on. Let’s see where this goes; maybe in 5 years, Codeberg will have dethroned GitHub as the go-to for open source and community projects. It’s definitely interesting to keeping an eye on this. And creating an account on Codeberg before all the good names are gone!
So there we are. I don’t really object Gitea so much as I want to support the Forgejo project. I like the idea of a free and open source, self-hosted alternative under the umbrella of a non-profit. We already have GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket (if it still exists; I hope it doesn’t), and to some extent, also SourceHut.
The upgrade to Forgejo was essentially a non-event. It still is a drop-in replacement for Gitea. So that just meant changing the docker image:
modified git/git/Dockerfile
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-FROM gitea/gitea:1.21
+FROM codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo:1.21
After restarting the service, https://git.friedl.net/ is alive and well, now powered by Forgejo.
If you are considering moving to Forgejo too, I recommend not wasting any more time. It is super easy right now, but that will likely change. Forgejo already announced a hard fork!
Going forward, I will look into moving my Drone integration to Forgejo Actions. This will be a little more work. But Actions seem to be well integrated into Forgejo, and that means one less moving part to worry about. I’m very much looking forward to this!
Hello Forgejo!