I recently set up Gitea on a VPS for my personal projects - I can highly recommend it. Setup was easy (for someone comfortable with linux configuration basics) and it's been an awesome improvement to my hobby development flow.
Seconded. I setup gitea on my server when Microsoft bought GitHub after comparing between gitlab, bitbucket, gogs, cgit, gitolite, and gitea. Gitea has the best community, features, and system requirements. Sad to say I still haven't moved my projects off of GitHub, but gitea setup wasn't the problem.
One thing I'd still like to see, and am thinking if I may (as a nobody with no connections) somehow be able to organise myself, is a global search. One of the main advantages of GitHub is discoverability, both as a project owner and as a project seeker. What if there was a server that distributed searches to the different self-hosted instances of gitea/gogs/gitlab/etc.? (Opt-in of course.)
The search would be distributed amongst all those setups which hopefully makes it light enough even though there will probably be a large volume, and this way people would have no reason to stay with a centralized company for git and bugtracker hosting. You could even have a client that connects to the instances individually, so even the search distribution server does not have to be centralized, you just need a DHT (ahem, I mean blockchain!) or some other central list of contributing nodes. And for very lightweight setups that still want to appear in search results, one could perhaps have different levels of results, from full code index to repository names and descriptions only.
Edit: removed a part about ForgeFed which I thought was what I had in mind, and they do a lot of things that would be nice to have (slightly more convenient than just "login with GitHub")... except search which you can't simply work around by creating an account on each git server where you want to contribute. Not sure what part of their project is discovery and why NLnet granted them money under the "Next Generation Search and Discovery" fund which, from the description, is very clearly aimed at search.
I see that things like the Plume blogging platform have a cross-instance search, but whenever I ctrl+f for search on any documentation page there's nothing. For example, it says the four protocols it uses are activitypub (link goes to the spec at W3; the whole spec never mentions the word search), webfinger (spec page, an RFC, also never mentions it), HTTP signatures (just for verification it seems), and nodeinfo ("not part of the federation itself, but that gives some metadata about each instance"). I've looked in more places but this was one of the more concrete examples of where there clearly is search but I can't find the code or protocol anywhere.
Edit: checked another; Peertube does not seem to search across instances.
In my opinion gitea is a good lightweight alternative to gitlab - easy to run, easy to maintain and pretty good for a private git server. Since it is written in go and consists of only ONE single binary, it is also easy to upgrade and it also performs well on smaller systems (e.g. Raspberry PI).
In professional environments with Jenkins and Sonarqube i would prefer gitlab though.
I actually looked at Gitea first but as far as I can tell they don't have a working Docker image for ARMv7 (I'm running on 32-bit Raspbian). I manage everything in a series of Docker compose files managed in version control, so not being able to use Docker was a deal breaker for me.
I'm keeping my eye on it though and if the situation ever changes, I will certainly take another look at it. Gitea seems like a great tool.
On one hand, yeah, I get it. I like using Docker for everything too.
On the other, installation is copying a single Go file to the desired location and running the configurator. Going from zero to fully set up and running took me about 15 minutes. At that point, Docker doesn't seem to offer a lot on top of that simplicity.
Totally agree, however the big draw for me is that with Docker/docker-compose I can keep all of the configuration in a version controlled repository along with all of the other apps/services I run on my little server. Of course it's possible to still do this and run it natively, but that's the reason I prefer a Docker solution.
There's a lot to be said for that, for sure! But I make up for a lot of lost ground on that by making a repo in /etc . I don't add everything to it, but I generally add files before I alter them so that I can roll back to the original state.
Nothing actually, in response to all of the mentions of Gitea in this thread I've since spun up the ARMv6 version myself and have been tinkering around with it!
