Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people (unterwaditzer.net)
415 points by jslakro 6 hours ago
noirscape 5 hours ago
I don't dislike Codeberg inherently, but it's not a "true" GitHub replacement. It can handle a good chunk of GitHub repositories (namely those for well established FOSS projects looking to have everything a proper capital P project has), but if you're just looking for a generic place to put your code projects that aren't necessarily intended for public release and support (ie. random automation scripts, scraps of concepts that never really got off the ground, things not super cleaned up), they're not really for that - private repositories are discouraged according to their FAQ and are very limited (up to 100mb).
They also don't want to host your homepage, so if GitHub Pages is why you used GitHub, they are not a replacement.
Unfortunately I don't think there's really an answer to that conundrum that doesn't involve just spinning up your own git server and accepting all the operational overhead that comes with it. At least Forgejo (software behind Codeberg) is FOSS, so you can do that and it should cover most of what you need (and while you're in the realm of having a server, a Pages-esque replacement is trivial since you're configuring a webserver anyway.) Maybe Gitlab.com, although I am admittedly unfamiliar with how Gitlab's "main" instance has changed over the years wrt features.
Here's their FAQ on the matter, it's worth a read: https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/
NewJazz 2 hours ago
Unfortunately I don't think there's really an answer to that conundrum that doesn't involve just spinning up your own git server and accepting all the operational overhead that comes with it.
Hmm all that operational overhead... Of an ssh server? If you literally just want a place to push some code, then that really isn't that hard.
jayd16 42 minutes ago
Lots and lots of programmers have very little understanding and especially operation knowledge of how to host a public service. You can be an extreme graphics programmer and not know the web stack at all.
And no, its not that hard once you learn. Except, now its a never ending chore when it was an appliance. Instead of a car you have a project car.
mememememememo 10 minutes ago
zahlman 31 minutes ago
mejutoco 2 hours ago
In case anybody is interested, having a bare git repo on a server is as easy as:
# locally
ssh [email protected]
# server
mkdir repo.git
cd repo.git
git --bare init
# locally
git remote add origin ssh://[email protected]/home/git/repo.git
git push origin master
SpaceNoodled an hour ago
stephenr an hour ago
overfeed 12 minutes ago
> ...that really isn't that hard.
Until the AI scrapers[1] come for you at 5k requests per second and you're doing operations in hard-mode.
1. Most forges have http pages for discoverability. I suppose one could hypothetically setup an ssh-only forge and statically generate a html site periodically, but this is already advanced ops for the average Github user
NewJazz 6 minutes ago
tbayramov an hour ago
(Shameless plug)
Hey, I’m building Monohub - as a GitHub alternative, and having private repositories is perhaps a key feature - it started as a place for me to host my own random stuff. Monohub [dot] dev is the URL. It’s quite early in development, so it’s quite rough around the edges. It has PR support though.
Hosted in EU, incorporated in EU.
Would be happy if you tried it out — maybe it’s something for you.
Edit: you can have a look at a public repository I have to see what it looks like now: https://monohub.dev/@tbayramov/efcore-audit-timestamps
WhyNotHugo 17 minutes ago
Doesn’t .dev belong to Google? An old choice or provider for a EU-focused hosting.
stephenr an hour ago
Are you using an existing forge package (like eg Forgejo which codeberg is built on) or something custom?
tbayramov 39 minutes ago
real_joschi 5 hours ago
> They also don't want to host your homepage, so if GitHub Pages is why you used GitHub, they are not a replacement.
noirscape 4 hours ago
From their FAQ:
> If you do not contribute to free/libre software (or if it is limited to your personal homepage), and we feel like you only abuse Codeberg for storing your commercial projects or media backups, we might get unhappy about that.
Emphasis mine. This isn't about if it's technically possible (it certainly is), it's whether or not it's allowed by their platform policies.
Their page publishing feature seems more like it's meant for projects and organizations rather than individual people. The way it's described here indicates that using them to host your own blog/portfolio/what have you is considered to be abusing their services.
shimman 3 hours ago
johnisgood 4 hours ago
enraged_camel 4 hours ago
sneak 25 minutes ago
I love Gitea and self-hosting it has been effortless, even through upgrades.
AlienRobot an hour ago
To me that sounds like Github does too many things, not that Codeberg does too few.
BeetleB 8 minutes ago
Indeed. A code repository alternative should definitely not require an equivalent to Github Pages.
pyth0 an hour ago
To me, and devs at large (given their market share), that sounds like convenience.
ronsor 4 hours ago
The truth is that I publish OSS projects on GitHub because that's where the community is, and the issues/pull requests/discussions are a bonus.
If I just want to host my code, I can self host or use an SSH/SFTP server as a git remote, and that's usually what I do.
embedding-shape 4 hours ago
> I publish OSS projects on GitHub because that's where the community is
And so we go, forever in circles, until enough of us move to other platforms regardless of where the existing community is. Just like how GitHub found its community in the early days, when most people (afaik) was using SourceForge, if anything.
"The community" will always remain on GitHub, if everyone just upload code to where "the community" already is. If enough of us stop using GitHub by default, and instead use something else, eventually "the community" will be there too, but it is somewhat of a chicken-and-egg problem, I admit.
I myself workaround this by dropping the whole idea that I'm writing software for others, and I only write it for myself, so if people want it, go to my personal Gitea instance and grab it if you want, I couldn't care less about stars and "publicity" or whatever people nowadays care about. But I'm also lucky enough to already have a network, it might require other's to build their network on GitHub first, then also be able to do something similar, and it'll all work out in the end.
ronsor 4 hours ago
> "The community" will always remain on GitHub, if everyone just upload code to where "the community" already is. If enough of us stop using GitHub by default, and instead use something else, eventually "the community" will be there too, but it is somewhat of a chicken-and-egg problem, I admit.
SourceForge was abandoned due to UX issues and the adware debacle; at the same time, GitHub started making changes which made it more viable to use the platform to distribute binary releases.
The deficiencies of GitHub are not critical enough for me to care, and if it ever gets that bad, pushing somewhere else and putting a few "WE HAVE MOVED" links isn't a big deal.
And "the community" isn't moving to Codeberg because Codeberg can't support "the community" without a massive scale up.
mech422 an hour ago
zerkten 2 hours ago
WhyNotHugo 15 minutes ago
> that's where the community is
The part of the FOSS community that embraces proprietary dependencies are there, but there’s a lot of the community outside of it.
Fortunately, GitHub is pushing hard for folks to want to move away.
JuniperMesos 2 hours ago
In particular a number of other projects assume that you have a GitHub account. https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/326 has been open for literally a decade without any meaningful work. If you want to publish a Lean software packages on Reservoir, the official Lean package registry, their requirements (https://reservoir.lean-lang.org/inclusion-criteria) not only specify a GitHub project specifically, but having at least two stars on GitHub as a "basic quality filter". Microsoft is a big funder of Lean and I can't help but think this is a deliberate restriction to increase lock-in on a Microsoft-owned platform.
ncruces 2 hours ago
GitHub also generously gives me a bunch of free CI, in exchange for whatever they benefit from me being there.
It's worth $50 just this month, according to them, but I don't see anyone else offering the mac runners that account for most of it.
For all the complaints, I test my packages that actually need it across dozens of architecture and OS combinations with a mix of runners, nested virtualization and qemu binfmt, all on their free platform.
sc68cal an hour ago
I have been struggling with this, myself. I used to push everything to GitHub, but a couple months ago I switched over to using my small low-power home server as a Git host. I used to really enjoy the feeling of pushing commits up to GitHub, and that little dopamine rush hasn't really transferred to my home machine yet.
It's a shame. The people who control the money successfully committed enshittification against open source.
LinXitoW 3 hours ago
Considering that "the community" is now filled with vibe coding slop pull requesters, and non-coders bitching in issues, the filter that not-github provides becomes better and better.
Of course, that mostly goes for projects big enough to already have an indepedent community.
goku12 3 hours ago
Not to contradict you, but there's another important aspect to 'community' besides the bad contributors and the entitled complainers. That's discoverability. How do you discover a project that may be hosted anywhere on the dozens of independent forges out there? Searching each one individually is not a viable proposition. The search often ends on the biggest platform - Github.
I'm not trying defend github here. The largest platform could have been anyone who took advantage of the early opportunities in the space, which just happens to be Github. But discoverability is still a nagging problem. I don't think that even a federated system (using activitypub, atproto or whatever else out there) is going to solve that problem. We need a solution that can scour the entire code hosting space like search engines do (but collaboratively, not aggressively like LLM scrapers).
andybak 3 hours ago
cdrnsf 5 hours ago
I've been using a self-hosted forgejo (which Codeberg uses and maintains) instance for all of my non-work projects and it's been great. I don't miss GitHub at all. I also keep it accessible only from Tailscale so that AI crawlers and such can speedily make their way into the sun.
huijzer 4 hours ago
I have moved to self-host Forgejo a few years ago and I can also highly recommend. It's working great. I have posted a tutorial [1] (verified last month that it still works), and recently moved from Hetzner to 2 Raspberry Pi's for hosting the server and the runner [2]. It's great. Really rock solid. Has been more reliable and faster than GitHub.
[1]: https://huijzer.xyz/posts/55/installing-forgejo-with-a-separ...
[2]: https://huijzer.xyz/posts/55/installing-forgejo-with-a-separ...
xrd 2 hours ago
Yes, this.
I was self hosting gitlab for a long time. But forgejo is an order of magnitude less resource intensive.
It is a single very small go binary. You can use sqlite or postgres. But you can easily run it inside a small docker container on your local machine.
And it is fun to hack on it because it is so open. You build really fun workflows that are blocked by the corporate limits of Github.
poorman 4 hours ago
Same. I installed Forgejo two months ago when Github wouldn't let me create agent accounts. It's been awesome. Any time I want a new feature I open my agent on the server and tell it to add the feature to Forgejo. Took all of 15 minutes for it to add a working Show/Hide "Viewed" files on the PR reviews.
huijzer 4 hours ago
You mean you upstream those changes or are you running your own fork?
dml2135 3 hours ago
Same, I've been enjoying it a ton. Recently, with the help of Claude, I've used it to set up an entire CI/CD pipeline for my home server. The flow is roughly:
Build Nix config into a VM image => Deploy VM to Proxmox via its API => Spin up Docker stack via Komodo
I've also trying to use it to sync my Obsidian vault via git to my phone, altho that flaked out on me recently (if anyone knows a reliable way to use git via the shell on iOS, please let me know).
midasz 4 hours ago
Same - also installed a forgejo runner via docker so i've got CI. Forgejo has it's own artifactory/registry so the apps I make get a docker image and I just run that docker image. All on my own hardware.
alargemoose 4 hours ago
I went with gitea, but for the same general reasons. I like It has the option to mirror repos up to GitHub for the stuff I actually want to share with the world. Is there anything that made you choose forgejo specifically? I’m not eager to move platforms, but I know there’s more options that have popped up in the years since I first stood up my gitea instance.
eblume 4 hours ago
Same! I've also recently exposed mine to the internet through a fly.io proxy, though. So far, no issues, but I'm keeping a close eye.
woodruffw 5 hours ago
I think evaluating alternatives to GitHub is going to become increasingly important over the coming years. At the same time, I think these kinds of migrations discount how much GitHub has changed the table stakes/raised the bar for what makes a valuable source forge: it's simply no longer reasonable to BYO CI or accept one that can't natively build for a common set of end-user architectures.
This on its own makes me pretty bearish on community-driven attempts to oust GitHub, even if ideologically I'm aligned with them: the real cost (both financial and in terms of complexity) of user expectations around source forges in 2026 is immense.
usrbinenv 5 hours ago
I don't understand the hype around CI and that it's supposedly impossible to run something like that without Git, let alone Github. Like sure, a nice interface is fine, but I can do with a simpler one. I don't need a million features, because what is CI (in practice today, not in theory)? It's just a set of commands that run on a remote machine and then the output of those commands is displayed in the browser and it also influences what other commands may or may not run. What exactly is the big deal here? It can probably be built internally if needed and it certainly doesn't need to depend on git so much - git can trigger it via hooks, but that's it?
I think the real problem is we were sold all these complex processes that supposedly deliver better results, while in reality for most people and orgs it's just cargo culting, like with Kubernetes, for example. We can get rid of 90% of them and be just fine. You easily get away without any kind of CI in teams of less than 5-7 people I would argue - just have some sane rules and make everyone follow them (like run unit tests before submitting a PR).
ncruces 2 hours ago
GitHub CI lets me test my package, for free, in all these: https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3/wiki/Support-matrix
Which is actually useful.
duped 4 hours ago
> just have some sane rules and make everyone follow them (like run unit tests before submitting a PR)
and thus you discover the value of CI
IshKebab 3 hours ago
The big deal is that GitHub provides it for free. Plus it integrated properly into the PR workflow.
Good luck implementing merge queues yourself. As far as I know there are no maintained open source implementations of merge queues. It's definitely not as trivial as you claim.
WhyNotHugo 13 minutes ago
> it's simply no longer reasonable to BYO CI or accept one that can't natively build for a common set of end-user architectures.
GitHub’s hosted runners support a grant total of two architectures.
The only forges which I’ve seen with more variety are distributios’ forges usually hosting their own runners.
prmoustache 5 hours ago
> it's simply no longer reasonable to BYO CI
Why? I know plenty of teams which are fine with repo and CI being separate tools as long as there is integration between the 2.
CuriouslyC 5 hours ago
Actions are bad, but they're free (to start) and just good enough that they're useful to set up something quick and dirty, and tempt you to try and scale it for a little while.
knocte 2 hours ago
woodruffw 5 hours ago
Emphasis on teams; the median open source project has a fraction of a single person working on it.
wongarsu 5 hours ago
CI needs good integration into the source forge. But I don't really perceive Github actions as a huge benefit over the times when everone just set up CircleCI or whatever. As long as it can turn PR checks red, yellow and green and has a link to the logs I'm happy
The whole PR and code review experience is much more important to me. Github is striving to set a high bar, but is also hilariously bad in some ways. Similarly the whole issue system is passable on Github, but doesn't really reach the state of the art of issue systems from 20 years ago
psychoslave 4 hours ago
Working with all these modern layers, I don't see why people bother so much about it. This is all upper level decision to centralize so they feel they keep control. As a dev I'm 100% confident life would be as least as pleasant without all this abysmal layers of remote services that could all be replaced with distributed solutions that work 100% in local with thin sync step here and there.
999900000999 5 hours ago
GitHub gives you a lot for "free". In exchange they'll have no problem harvesting your data, and it would really surprise me if they aren't training on private repos too. I guess you can opt out and if they're opt out doesn't work oh well.
On the other hand Codeberg doesn't let you create private repositories at all. So Copilot could still legally scrape your open source Codeberg repos.
I don't see much of a point for most people. https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/ >If you need private repositories for commercial projects (e.g. because you represent a company or are a developer that needs a space to host private freelance projects for your clients), we would highly recommend that you take a look at Forgejo. Forgejo is the Git hosting software that Codeberg runs. It is free software and relatively easy to self-host. Codeberg does not offer private hosting services.
b00ty4breakfast 5 hours ago
>On the other hand Codeberg doesn't let you create private repositories at all.
are you sure about that? I'm fairly certain my repos on codeberg are all private but I could be mistaken.
mfenniak 5 hours ago
It is kinda incorrect and kinda correct. Codeberg allows you to create private repositories. However, their rules are clear that the intent of private repositories must be in support of Free software projects: https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/#how-about-pri..., which for many people is effectively not allowing private repositories.
arcanemachiner 5 hours ago
erdaniels 3 hours ago
I just migrated our entire company off of github to gitlab self-hosted. So far so good. It's entirely behind tailscale so we don't have any SSO tax from gitlab and all of our CI runners are on EKS + an on-prem cluster with GPUs. If anyone needs help or motivation accomplishing the same, just reach out!
literallyroy an hour ago
Does self-hosted support SCIM or something else easy to connect for automatic user provisioning? Or do yal do account creations manually?
bachittle 3 hours ago
Did you also try Forgejo? If so, what are the differences between the two? I didn't even know GitLab had a self-hosted option. I assume it's probably better for Enterprise-grade projects, and dealing with CI/CD, actions, etc. But for smaller projects that just have issues and PRs and minor test suites, I assume Forgejo is the better lightweight option.
erdaniels 3 hours ago
Yeah I tried hosting forgejo and the first issue I found was that it was crashing some of the time with our large monorepo and getting actions/runners up and running was proving time consuming; I really did like how lightweight it was, monolith wise. gitlab has a lot more architecture behind it but the documentation is very good at describing how you should configure it for your needs.
I think Forgejo would work fine for smaller projects and teams. We really wanted to stop having to worry about GitHub going and not being able to do CD as well as get away from a lot of the action zero-days happening.
And yes, it's self-hosted and free! You can run a reference implementation pretty easily with non-production components (i.e. they won't backup or scale well).
INTPenis 5 hours ago
Lazy has nothing to do with it, codeberg simply doesn't work.
Most of my friends who use codeberg are staunch cloudflare-opponents, but cloudflare is what keeps Gitlab alive. Fact of life is that they're being attacked non-stop, and need some sort of DDoS filter.
Codeberg has that anubis thing now I guess? But they still have downtime, and the worst thing ever for me as a developer is having the urge to code and not being able to access my remote. That is what murders the impression of a product like codeberg.
Sorry, just being frank. I want all competitors to large monopolies to succeed, but I also want to be able to do my job/passion.
embedding-shape 5 hours ago
Maybe I'm too old school, but both GitHub and Codeberg for me are asyncronous "I want to send/share the code somehow", not "my active workspace I require to do work". But reading
> the worst thing ever for me as a developer is having the urge to code and not being able to access my remote.
Makes it seem like GitHub/Codeberg has to be online for you to be able to code, is that really the case? If so, how does that happen, you only edit code directly in the GitHub web UI or how does one end up in that situation?
freedomben 5 hours ago
For me it's a soft block rather than a hard block. I use multiple computers so when I switch to the other one I usually do a git pull, and after every commit I do a push. If that gets interrupted, then I have resort to things like rsyncing over from the other system, but more than once I've lost work that way. I'm strongly considering just standing up a VM and using "just git" and foregoing any UI, but I make use of other features like CI/CD and Releases for distribution, so the VM strategy is still just a bandaid. When the remote is unavailable, it can be very disruptive.
embedding-shape 5 hours ago
SoftTalker 5 hours ago
messe 5 hours ago
cyberrock 3 hours ago
For some projects, the issue tracker is a pretty integral part of the documentation. Sure, you can host your own issue tracker somewhere, but that's still shifting a center point somewhere, in a theoretically decentralized system. I've frequently wished the issue tracker was part of the repository. Also -- love them or hate them -- LLMs would probably love that too.
the_mitsuhiko 4 hours ago
My main exposure to Codeberg is Zig and it has an issue tracker there and I pull in changes from it.
For how infrequent I interface with Codeberg I have to say that my experience has been pretty terrible when it comes to availability.
So I guess the answer is: the availability is bad enough that even infrequent interactions with it are a problem.
dspillett 5 hours ago
> Makes it seem like GitHub/Codeberg has to be online for you to be able to code, is that really the case?
I can understand that work with other active contributors, but I agree with you that it is a daft state of affairs for a solo or mostly-solo project.
Though if you have your repo online even away from the big places, it will get hit by the scrapers and you will end up with admin to do because of that, even if it doesn't block your normal workflow because your main remote is not public.
tonymet 4 hours ago
You’re right this is the proper way to use git. And I encourage developers to use their own cloud storage (or remote volume) for their primary remote.
Even with the best habits, there will be the few times a month where you forgot to push everything up and you’re blocked from work.
Codeberg needs to meet the highest ability levels for it to be viable.
pferde 5 hours ago
I was shaking my head in disbelief when reading that part too. I mean, git's whole raison d'etre, back when it was introduced, was that you do not need online access to the repo server most of the time.
sodapopcan 5 hours ago
dspillett 4 hours ago
freedomben 5 hours ago
I've had the same experience.
Philosophically I think it's terrible that Cloudflare has become a middleman in a huge and important swath of the internet. As a user, it largely makes my life much worse. It limits my browser, my ability to protect myself via VPNs, etc, and I am just browsing normally, not attacking anything. Pragmatically though, as a webmaster/admin/whatever you want to call it nowadays, Cloudflare is basically a necessity. I've started putting things behind it because if I don't, 99%+ of my traffic is bots, and often bots clearly scanning for vulnerabilities (I run mostly zero PHP sites, yet my traffic logs are often filled with requests like /admin.php and /wp-admin.php and all the wordpress things, and constant crawls from clearly not search engines that download everything and use robots.txt as a guide of what to crawl rather than what not to crawl. I haven't been DDoSed yet, but I've had images and PDFs and things downloaded so many times by these things that it costs me money. For some things where I or my family are the only legitimate users, I can just firewall-cmd all IPs except my own, but even then it's maintenance work I don't want to have to do.
I've tried many of the alternatives, and they often fail even on legitimate usecases. I've been blocked more by the alternatives than I have by Cloudflare, especially that one that does a proof of work. It works about 80% of the time, but that 20% is really, really annoying to the point that when I see that scren pop up I just browse away.
It's really a disheartening state we find ourselves in. I don't think my principles/values have been tested more in the real world than the last few years.
rglullis 4 hours ago
Either I am very lucky or what I am doing has zero value to bots, because I've been running servers online for at least 15 years, and never had any issue that couldn't be solved with basic security hygiene. I use cloudflare as my DNS for some servers, but I always disable any of their paid features. To me they could go out of business tomorrow and my servers would be chugging along just fine.
j16sdiz 3 hours ago
dspillett 4 hours ago
> and use robots.txt as a guide of what to crawl rather than what not to crawl
Mental note, make sure my robots.txt files contain a few references to slowly returning pages full of almost nonsense that link back to each other endlessly…
Not complete nonsense, that would be reasonably easy to detect and ignore. Perhaps repeats of your other content with every 5th word swapped with a random one from elsewhere in the content, every 4th word randomly misspelt, every seventh word reversed, every seventh sentence reversed, add a random sprinkling of famous names (Sir John Major, Arc de Triomphe, Sarah Jane Smith, Viltvodle VI) that make little sense in context, etc. Not enough change that automatic crap detection sees it as an obvious trap, but more than enough that ingesting data from your site into any model has enough detrimental effect to token weightings to at least undo any beneficial effect it might have had otherwise.
And when setting traps like this, make sure the response is slow enough that it won't use much bandwidth, and the serving process is very lightweight, and just in case that isn't enough make sure it aborts and errors out if any load metric goes above a given level.
matrss 3 hours ago
freedomben 2 hours ago
dwedge 3 hours ago
While I sympathise, I disagree with your stance. Cloudflare handle a large % of the Internet now because of people putting sites that, as you admitted, don't need to be behind it there.
frevib 4 hours ago
OP is about Github. Have you seen the Github uptime monitor? It’s at 90% [1] for the last 90 days. I use both Codeberg and Github a lot and Github has, by far, more problems than Codeberg. Sometimes I notice slowdowns on Codeberg, but that’s it.
kevinfiol 3 hours ago
To be fair, Github has several magnitudes higher of users running on it than Codeberg. I'm also a Codeberg user, but I don't think anyone has seen a Forgejo/Gitea instance working at the scale of Github yet.
apetresc 3 hours ago
jrudolph 3 hours ago
era-epoch an hour ago
kjuulh 5 hours ago
My own git server has been hit severely by scrapers. They're scraping everything. Commits, comparisons between commits, api calls for files, everything.
And pretty much all of them, ByteDance, OpenAI, AWS, Claude, various I couldn't recognize. I basically just had to block all of them to get reasonable performance for a server running on a mini-pc.
I was going to move to codeberg at some point, but they had downtime when I was considering it, I'd rather deal with that myself then.
marginalia_nu 4 hours ago
Anyone actually scraping git repos would probably just do a 'git clone'. Crawling git hosts is extremely expensive, as git servers have always been inadvertent crawler traps.
They generate a URL for every version of every file on every commit and every branch and tag, and if that wasn't enough, n(n+1)/2 git diffs for every file on every commit it has exited on. Even a relatively small git repo with a few hundred files and commit explodes into millions of URLs in the crawl frontier. Server side many of these are very expensive to generate as well so it's really not a fantastic interaction, crawler and git host.
If you run a web crawler, you need to add git host detection to actively avoid walking into them.
Tharre 3 hours ago
Eldt 3 hours ago
ori_b 4 hours ago
prmoustache 5 hours ago
The whole point of git is to be decentralized so there is no reason for you to not have your current version available even when a remote is offline.
mr_mitm 4 hours ago
How do people even on hacker news of all places conflate git with a code hosting platform all the time? Codeberg, GitHub or whatever are for tracking issues, running CI, hosting builds, and much more.
The idea that you shouldn't need a code hosting platform because git is decentralized is so out of place that it is genuinely puzzling how often it pops up.
hombre_fatal 4 hours ago
dandellion 5 hours ago
It's also trivial to have multiple remotes, I do in most of my repos. When one has issues I just push to the other instead of both.
iamkonstantin 3 hours ago
> for me as a developer is having the urge to code and not being able to access my remote
I think that's the moment when you choose to self host your whatever git wrapper. It really isn't that complicated to do and even allows for some fun (as in cheap and productive) setups where your forge is on your local network or really close to your region and you (maybe) only mirror or backup to a bigger system like Codeberg/GitHub.
In our case, we also use that as an opportunity to mirror OCI/package repositories for dependencies we use in our apps and during development so not only builds are faster but also we don't abuse free web endpoints with our CI/CD requests.
zelphirkalt 4 hours ago
Probably has happened at some point, but personally, I have not been hit with/experienced downtime of Codeberg yet. The other day however GitHub was down again. I have not used Gitlab for a while, and when I used it, it worked fine, and its CI seems saner than Github's to me, but Gitlab is not the most snappy user experience either.
Well, Codeberg doesn't have all the features I did use of Gitlab, but for my own projects I don't really need them either.
nfredericks 3 hours ago
I agree. I switched to Codeberg but switched back after a few months. Funny enough, I found there to be more unreported downtime on Codeberg than GitHub.
maelito 3 hours ago
> Lazy has nothing to do with it, codeberg simply doesn't work.
Been working on it for months now, it does work, lol.
z3t4 3 hours ago
I find irony in that Git was made to get rid of central repos, and then we re-introduce them.
johnisgood 3 hours ago
That is what we have been doing for quite some time now, from what I gathered. Every time I see something becoming popular, I am like "Hmm, I've seen this before", and I really have. They just gave it a fancier name with a fancier logo and did some marketing and there you go, old is new.
mtlynch 3 hours ago
>The by far nastiest part is CI. GitHub has done an excellent job luring people in with free macOS runners and infinite capacity for public repos.
This was my biggest blocker as well, as there weren't any managed CIs that supported Codeberg until recently.
NixCI[0] recently added support for Codeberg, and I've had a great experience with it. The catch is that you have to write your CI in Nix, though with LLMs, this is actually pretty easy. Most of my CI jobs are just bash scripts with some Nix wiring on top.[1] It also means you can reproduce all your CI jobs locally without changing any code.
[1] https://codeberg.org/mtlynch/little-moments/src/commit/d9856... - for example
mplanchard 5 hours ago
I've been mostly off the GitHub train since the MS acquisition, and think any alternative is a good alternative. Codeberg is great.
I've also been very happy with sourcehut for most of my personal projects for some time. The email patch submission workflow is a tad bit unfamiliar for most, but IMO in today's era raising that barrier to entry is mostly a good thing for OSS projects.
I also strongly prefer a simple CI environment (where you just run commands), which encourages you to actually be able to run your CI commands locally.
asim 4 hours ago
Why? I want to understand why? Out of principle? I think some services just end up becoming foundational and we need to move on to other things for other things e.g if we're going to replace GitHub it's because we're creating new habits. Not because we're replacing like for like. That never works. What is a new code hosting platform offering. You know what, pair it with some app dev and great, now you've got something. But just hosting elsewhere it's got to be a major step change the way GitHub was from sourceforge and self hosting. Inherently the social aspects drove that and the power of git. Personally I think you have to intertwine the code hosting with app development using agents like a Google doc. Commits everytime there is a change. Every prompt creates a commit. I don't know. We don't need to reinvent the wheel for nothing.
finnjohnsen2 2 hours ago
Geopolitics is a reason. Many individuals and companies are scrambling for safe alternatives to US tech. I live in Norway and there is a lot of this going on.
0x3f 4 hours ago
Why does this post exist? I assume because of the Copilot story that's also trending and the subsequent loss of trust. Not sure if Github has serious alternatives, but the desire to move is not for 'nothing'.
voxic11 4 hours ago
> What is a new code hosting platform offering.
For me its providing uptime. Github is barely reaching one nine of availability these days.
ramon156 2 hours ago
Instead of "moving", let's at least have some mirrors up. Mirror all your repos to CB, make a FOSS tool to do this automagically for you. Let users be able to just click a button and boom, mirror.
The goal is to get at least a % available on CB, then we can think about where the community is
Aperocky 2 hours ago
Why didn't codeberg make this FOSS tool though? Seems natural they should.
r14c 2 hours ago
They disabled the mirrors feature because they didn't want a bunch of accounts mirroring large repos and doing nothing else.
Forgejo does support mirrors, just not codeberg.
ponkpanda 5 hours ago
Repo hosting is the kind of thing that ought to be distributed/federated.
The underlying protocol (git) already has the cryptographic primitives that decouples trust in the commit tree (GPG or SSH signing) with trust in the storage service (i.e. github/codeberg/whatever).
All you need to house centrally is some SSH and/or gpg key server and some means of managing namespaces which would benefit from federation as well.
You'd get the benefits of de-centralisation - no over-reliance on actors like MS or cloudflare. I suppose if enough people fan out to gitlab, bitbucket, self hosting, codeberg, you end up with something that organically approximates a formally decentralised git repo system.
JuniperMesos 2 hours ago
https://radicle.xyz/ is a project aiming to do exactly this.
swiftcoder 4 hours ago
> Repo hosting is the kind of thing that ought to be distributed/federated.
Hence Tangled and ForgeFed (which I believe is integrating in Forejo)
mikepurvis 3 hours ago
I hadn't heard of either of these, but I'm interested.
I think at this point the bigger barrier to me with leaving GitHub (professionally, at least) is all the non-GitHub stuff that integrates nicely with it and badly or not at all with other solutions. And like, I don't blame tool providers for making a rational economic choice in that regard, but if leaving GitHub means leaving seamless Sentry, Depot, Linear, editor plugins, AI integrations, etc that makes it a tougher pill to swallow.
I worked for years at a shop that had in-house GitLab and we felt this pain first hand all the time. GitLab tries to be a one-stop shop and own the whole project management and testing/deployment workflow by building everything in house, but there were always gaps and it was hard not to be jealous of places that just did everything on GitHub and could use whatever best in class saas stuff they wanted.
Gitlab has been tracking a federation feature since at least 2018 [1], and I expect bitbucket, sourcehut, gitea, and others would move quickly on something like this as well, but there needs to be a protocol defined and some kind of plan for handling spam/abuse.
[1]: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/work_items/16514
GalaxySnail 2 hours ago
git-bug[1] looks promising, but I haven't tried it.
mrbluecoat 5 hours ago
Is there a "Moving open source search from GitHub to XYZ, for lazy people"? When I'm looking for solutions to problems that open source might be able to solve, I find the fracturing of code hosting platforms an annoyance.
fhennig 5 hours ago
Can you elaborate what the problem is? IMO hosting and search are quite decoupled, why not just search for "open source solution to problem XYZ" in your favorite search engine?
mrbluecoat 2 hours ago
I specifically like the filtering to say "permissive license in Go language"
InitialPhase55 5 hours ago
Might be more difficult for people with private repos, as I recall Codeberg doesn't like private repos on their platform.
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 5 hours ago
If you have a server, some cheap VPS will suffice, you can host a private git repo there without installing anything. Run this on your server:
git init --bare foo.git
git clone [email protected]:~/foo.git
throwa356262 5 hours ago
This is great, but you can also run foregjo (the server behind coderberg) on your VPS.
It is a single binary and I think it is also very light on resources. At least compared to gitlab.
dqv 4 hours ago
systems 5 hours ago
I just noticed this, they dont allow private repos (with few exceptions)
I wonder why they dont just offer unlimited private repos for (reasonably) paid accounts , I think maybe a 40 dollar per year (or 4 dollar monthly), is low and encouraging , and should be welcomed by many , I hope they consider it
wongarsu 5 hours ago
Codeberg is a German nonprofit. To keep their tax-advantaged status, anything they do has to follow the purpose established in their bylaws. That purpose is "to promote the creation, collection, distribution and preservation of Free Content (Open Content, Free Cultural Works) and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and their documentation in selfless work to enable equal opportunities regarding the access to knowledge and education. Furthermore, this also intends to raise awareness for the social and philosophical questions interconnected with this."
I imagine they would argue that private repositories do not follow this purpose, as they are neither free content nor FOSS. I believe you could argue that charging a modest fee for private repositories to finance the hosting of FOSS repositories is in line with the purpose, but you get on thinner ice with that. It could quickly make them appear more like a company than like a nonprofit
kps 3 hours ago
What I'd like to see is a lazy person's HOWTO for the last paragraph:
> You could tell Codeberg to push new commits to GitHub, but this allows users to still file PRs and comment on issues and commits 2. Some folks have dealt with this by disabling issues on the GitHub repo, but that is a really destructive action as it will 404 all issues, and pull requests cannot be disabled. Some repos like libvirt/libvirt have written a GitHub Action that automatically closes all pull requests.
maxdo 2 hours ago
Everything runs on servers that we control. We will not sell your data.
Hosted in Europe, we welcome the world.
```````
so it's you control, make money vs they control make money. what is the difference here , except some eu version of maga movement here?
aerzen 2 hours ago
Forgejo is also OSS, so you can easily migrate git and issues and prs and everything to your own hosted instance, if codeberg proves untrustworthy. Which I can't on github.
peter_griffin 2 hours ago
owned by a non profit instead of microsoft
paulddraper 2 hours ago
No service provider lock-in.
Codeberg is just a hosted instance of Forgejo (GPLv3).
They even support a workflow for migrating to a different Forgejo instance [1].
askonomm 3 hours ago
I'm self-hosting Forgejo on my own home server. It's super easy to do via Docker or as a single binary executable. I even have CI/CD runners on it, which was also very easy to set up. Definitely recommend for those who might not want to rely on someone else, be it Codeberg or not, but still get the same quality as Codeberg (as they literally run Forgejo themselves).
hgo 3 hours ago
Oh, I didn't know github had free macOS CI runners. Maybe that would solve my dreadful upcoming issue that I'd have to update my mac to a version with glass to be able to build for the app store.
codazoda 4 hours ago
I love the simple design of the page. This is a random observations, but I noticed the author has an interesting "likes" button that is served from an API on https://dddddddddzzzz.org, a curious and interesting looking domain. I'll have to go dig around his blog to see if he's written about this.
KomoD 4 hours ago
> This is a random observations, but I noticed the author has an interesting "likes" button that is served from an API on https://dddddddddzzzz.org, a curious and interesting looking domain. I'll have to go dig around his blog to see if he's written about this
Here you go: https://openheart.fyi
unwoven 5 hours ago
> The by far nastiest part is CI. GitHub has done an excellent job luring people in with free macOS runners and infinite capacity for public repos
Yup and this is where I pass on anything other than GitHub.
hrmtst93837 25 minutes ago
That "infinite capacity" on public runners is a bait-and-switch because it only feels free until your project trip over the throttling rules or the next crypto miner ruins it for everyone. Self-hosted runners are an option, but most small teams don't want to babysit cattle just to run tests.
It's funny how we traded server maintenance for CI vendor lock-in and now keep circling back to which pain we hate more.
maccard 5 hours ago
Agreed - this is also where Github is the most unreliable. our _number one_ reason for build failures is "GHA being down/degraded" in 2026.
conradev 5 hours ago
GitHub is free, but the runners are slow and increasingly unreliable.
I use Namespace (https://namespace.so) and I hook it up both to my personal GitHub as well as my personal Forgejo. I’m in the process of moving from the former to the latter!
ekropotin 5 hours ago
I didn’t really realize the degree of their slowness, until I migrated one of the projects on a self-hosted gitea and runners. This setup is just breezing! It’s an order of magnitude faster we’re talking about.
Granted, self-hosting git is not feasible for everyone, but GitHub + self hosted runners seems like a very good option.
thinkxl 5 hours ago
I've had a good experience with Woodpecker CI. I've heard that installation and integration with ForgeJo isn't easy, but I deploy everything to my homelab using Dokku, where I push a Dockerfile, mount a volume (on setup), and it's good to go.
I assume this isn't optimal for a business setup, but for personal projects, I don't miss GitHub Actions at all.
dangus 5 hours ago
I was going to say that I’d be happy to run a local Mac mini to be a runner but I noticed that Forgejo runners are only built for Linux.
It seems like to be a serious CI platform they really need to change Windows and Mac binaries for runners so you can build for those platforms.
And this is more of a Forgejo issue than a Codeberg issue specifically.
But also, I’d also throw out there the idea that CI doesn’t have to be at the same website as your source control. It’s nice that GitHub actions are conveniently part of the product but it’s not even really the top CI system out there.
mfenniak 5 hours ago
Forgejo is committed to using exclusively Free Software for it's own project development. Windows and Mac versions of the Forgejo Runner are built in the project's CI system as a minimal check to ensure platform compatibility, but due to the project's commitment, the project doesn't do integration testing on these platform. And therefore doesn't distribute untested software.
A contributor maintains a tested re-release of Forgejo Runner for Windows: https://github.com/Crown0815/Forgejo-runner-windows-builder
But, pull it down and build it, and it will work.
esafak 5 hours ago
I get it for open source projects but at least use something nice like depot.dev for commercial ventures.
packetlost 4 hours ago
tangled.org is another interesting take that's open source and built on ATProto (which I have mixed feelings about).
Also radicle.xyz
delduca 4 hours ago
> If you absolutely need macOS runners I’d recommend sticking with GitHub Actions on the GitHub repository...
This is the only reason I haven’t migrated yet (I keep a mirror[1]).
pfortuny 4 hours ago
I am really really amazed at how many people discount this alternative because it does not work but do not realize that they are being slaves to Microsoft by using Github. Honestly, I do not get it.
johnisgood 4 hours ago
Apparently they have issues with self-hosting and basic git usage so I am not surprised, but yes, so many open source advocates, yet they literally depend on Microsoft, a bit too much.
goku12 2 hours ago
> but yes, so many open source advocates, yet they literally depend on Microsoft, a bit too much.
I have abandoned github and even gitlab for all intents and purposes. But there's another side to consider in this.
It's always risky for the FOSS community to depend on a service that doesn't offer interoperability and freedom of migration. Ironically, Github is such a service built on a tool (git) that's built for maximum interop and migration. But the popularity of Github among the developer community isn't an accident. They worked really hard during their early stages as a startup, to gain the trust of community. Nobody foresaw Microsoft buying them at that stage (though you should really just assume that it would happen eventually).
The reluctance of a lot of them to abandon the platform can be attributed to lack of principles - IF it was an isolated incident. But we see the same story repeating with several development platforms. NPM is an example. PyPI and crates.io are still independent, as far as I know. But they aren't free of corporate influences either. No matter how much we try to avoid them, the companies just buy their way into these platforms when they become popular enough. I'm not happy with this. But I don't know a solution either.
p2detar 4 hours ago
> being slaves to Microsoft
An overly ideological PoV can make it easy to overlook that some people are simply on Github from a practical standpoint. I myself host Forgejo and moved a lot of stuff there. I don't really find a good reason to host anything on Codeberg, yet. Github still offers me a nice set of repos to find via the people I follow there.
d675 4 hours ago
What’s the hate on Microsoft?
pfortuny 4 hours ago
It's not hate, it is that everybody complains about their services and their predatory behavior but somehow Github gets a free pass. As if it were going to be free forever, and well maintained...
throwa356262 5 hours ago
Codeberg is not a 1-1 replacement for github/gitlab but for many people it is a better option.
I really wish there was a way to support with them a smaller amount then €24. I dont use codeberg myself but I really want to support them.
arcanemachiner 5 hours ago
I send them a couple bucks a month via Liberapay. I'm on mobile and short on time, but you can customize the donation amount easily.
KomoD 4 hours ago
You can, €24 is just for the membership
Wire transfer is €10
Stripe is €5
With PayPal you can send €0.01 if you want
Or Liberapay, as little as €0.01 per week
bachittle 3 hours ago
I have enjoyed using Forgejo over GitHub for local work. The features that GitHub has that plain Git does not includes a nice web renderer of markdown and code, issues and pull requests with comments, and project kanban boards. It's nice to have an alternative for local usage if GitHub ever goes down or just for private projects. Especially nice with agentic workflows, because agents can port issues, PRs, etc. back and forth between GitHub and Forgejo.
elzbardico 4 hours ago
Really, they day I finally tire of github, I will just move to gitlab. git hosting is not something I want to wast my time yak shaving.
huijzer 4 hours ago
I'm running Forgejo for years now and I spend almost no time on it. I just host it with my other services. Backups automatically with Syncthing and I manually check in on the server and run apt-get upgrade once every two weeks.
jtfrench 3 hours ago
Haven’t heard of Codeberg. What are the top reasons to switch from GitHub?
gitprolinux 4 hours ago
I just have to say that I wrote my on hosting git service and eat my own stuff at gitbusiness.com
steveharing1 4 hours ago
Having options is really important bcs relying heavily on one thing is not something that goes always well
Arcuru 4 hours ago
Does any service offer hosted Forgejo Actions Runners? Or Forgejo compatible CI?
I want to pay for CI on my Codeberg projects, but I've been struggling to find something where I can just pay by the minute. I have projects that benefit from large CI runners but my usage is low enough that it makes no sense to host my own.
lijunle 4 hours ago
The concerning part is commercial. That is why Cloudflare Pages/workers is a better option than GitHub pages or Vercel Pages.
fareesh 3 hours ago
never had a problem with github, i must be using it during the 90% of the time that it works
dalvrosa 5 hours ago
Codeberg vs selfhosted Gitlab. What do you think?
real_joschi 5 hours ago
I think the question is rather gitlab.com vs. self-hosted GitLab and Codeberg vs. self-hosted Forgejo.
jayd16 4 hours ago
For what its worth, it's pretty easy to maintain a low traffic Gitlab instance.
Jotalea 5 hours ago
even better, selfhost your own gitea instance
vaylian 4 hours ago
How do other people open pull/merge requests for your projects?
rmi_ 22 minutes ago
Just push to that instance, or, as Linus intended, send patches via e-mail.
swiftcoder 4 hours ago
Honest question: do you want them to? Most of us aren't running high-profile OSS projects, and drive-by PRs are a pretty widespread complaint about GitHub's model of opensource
KomoD 4 hours ago
They make an account or you give them one?
gaigalas 2 hours ago
> The by far nastiest part is CI.
But that's the most important part. A repository without CI is basically dead.
The biggest challenge of this era is automated verification, and proper CI infrastructure is essential.
GitHub feels like what Hudson/Jenkins was some decades ago. Horrible, but the only one that did what it did.
I run probably hundreds of dollars of CI on GitHub per month. Except I don't pay a cent for it (all open source public repos). I can't just let that go, those workers do real work.
sergiotapia 2 hours ago
The problem is paas platforms and other platforms don't really support codeberg or any other alternatives.
Can I link a codeberg repo to Railway for example?
I_am_tiberius 5 hours ago
I wish they had a paid plan for private repositories that aren't FOSS.
stock_toaster 4 hours ago
I recently ran across codefloe[1] recently in another thread[2], and have been considering it for private non-floss-related repos... haven't tried it out yet though, so mileage may vary.
fatterypt 3 hours ago
I've been using codefloe for everything personal, and I couldn't be happier. It's been stable, snappy, and offers me everything I need. I don't miss GitHub a single bit
stock_toaster 27 minutes ago
jjslocum3 4 hours ago
I'm still more comfortable keeping my code in America.
jedisct1 4 hours ago
Codeberg is great, but I really miss Octobox.
I can't imagine using GitHub without Octobox; it's just impossible to keep track of all the notifications by email.
Unfortunately, Octobox doesn't support GitHub, so I've no idea how to follow projects, even the ones I really want to contribute to.
sylware 4 hours ago
codeberg.org still requires "javascript" aka one of the massive whatng cartel c++ written web engines. Do prefer sourcehut or others which are not web apps, in other words are web sites (classic web, or noscript/basic html for critical core functions at least, like issue tracking).
microsoft carefully broke classic web support overtime, THX AGAIN MICROSOFT, WE LOVE YOU!
rvz 5 hours ago
This was kind of predictable [0] and even self-hosting your own solution was done way before GitHub existed and now has better uptime than them.
Now they are turning GitHub into a canteen for AI agents and their AI chatbots (Copilot, Tay.ai and Zoe) to feed them on your code if you don't opt out.
> The by far nastiest part is CI. GitHub has done an excellent job luring people in with free macOS runners and infinite capacity for public repos
Hosting was never free and if you do not want Codeberg to go the way of GitHub, you need to pay for it.
Otherwise expect GitHub downtime to hit every week or so.