That’s what I run on my personal server now.
Almost went with Gitea, but the ownership structure is murky, feature development seems to have plateaued, and they haven’t even figured out how to host their own code. It’s still all on GitHub.
I’ve been impressed by Forgejo. It’s so much faster than Github to perform operations, I can actually backup my entire corpus of data in a format that’s restorable/usable, and there aren’t useless (AI) upsells cluttering my UX.
For listeners at home wondering why you'd want that at all:
I want a centralized Git repo where I can sync config files from my various machines. I have a VPS so I just create a .git directory and start using SSH to push/pull against it. Everything works!
But then, my buddy wants to see some of my config files. Hmm. I can create an SSH user for him and then set the permissions on that .git to give him read-only access. Fine. That works.
Until he improves some of them. Hey, can I give him a read-write repo he can push a branch to? Um, sure, give me a bit to think this through...
And one of his coworkers thinks this is fascinating and wants to look, too. Do I create an SSH account for this person I don't know well at all?
At this point, I've done more work than just installing something like Forgejo and letting my friend and his FOAF create accounts on it. There's a nice UI for configuring their permissions. They don't have SSH access directly into my server. It's all the convenience of something like GitHub, except entirely under my control and I don't have to pay for private repos.
Forgejo promised — but is yet to deliver any — interesting features like federation; meanwhile the real features they've been shipping are cosmetic changes like being able to set pronouns in your profile (and then another 10 commits to improve that...)
If you judge by very superficial metrics like commit counts, forgejo's count is heavily inflated by merges (which gitea development process doesn't use, preferring rebase), and frequent dependency upgragdes. When you remove that, the remaining commits represent maybe half of gitea's development activity.
So I expect to observe both for another year before deciding on where to upgragde. They're too similar at the moment.
FWIW, one of gitea larger users — Blender — continues to use and sponsor gitea and has no plans to switch AFAIK.
git log --since="1 year ago" --format="%an" | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | wc -l
And it looks to me like Forgejo is using a similar process of combining lots of smaller PR commits into a single merge commit. The wide majority of its commits since last June or so seem to be 1-commit-per-PR. Changing the above command to `--since="2024-07-1"` reduces the number of unique contributors to 136 for Gitea, 217 for Forgejo. It also shows 1228 commits for Gitea and 3039 for Forgejo, and I do think that's a legitimately apples-to-apples comparison.
If we brute force it and run
git log --since="1 year ago" | rg '\(\#\d{4,5}\)' | wc -l
And finally, their respective activity pages (https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pulse/monthly and https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/activity/monthly) show a similar story.
I'm not an expert in methodology here, but from my initial poking around, it would seem to me that Forgejo has a lot more activity and variety of contributors than Gitea does.