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Comment by Catbert59 | Hacker News Reader

GitLab is great - but super fat. The performance will suffer heavily if you don't give it the resources it wants (all RAM you can find, lol).

If you only need Git plus project tracking Gitea is super mature. It runs happily on small VPS.

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I prefer Forgejo, but both it and Gitea support actions like GitHub's. You can have a nice CI/CD pipeline that runs 100% in-house, for free. I adore it for personal projects.

> You can have a nice CI/CD pipeline that runs 100% in-house, for free.

Interested! Some detail on how you achieve this for free would be great.

Well, Forgejo’s Actions are very similar to GitHub’s: https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/actions/actions/

If you want to run a process after each push to a branch or merge into main or whatever, you describe it in a YAML file in that repo. Configure some workers to run those actions and off you go! I use it for things like running tests and applying Terraform changes.

I understand that part. Mostly interested where the runners are coming from? macOS especially is pretty costly to provide runners for, so who is doing that for free?

You provide the runners on your own hardware. Perhaps a Mac mini would fit the bill?

> Gitea support actions like GitHub's

Citation needed. nektos/act is for sure not "like GitHub's"

Here's Gitea's own comparison to GitHub's Actions: https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/comparison

Sure, it's not identical, and no one claims it is. I think it's defensibly like them, though.

We've run Gitea actions (and contributed here and there) for a couple of years, since-by-side with Github. We host in containers on the Gitea side so there are some marginal differences as to what can be run in a job, but our experience has been very positive.

Yes it is. It's not identical, but it is "like" it.

Most of my build config run on either platform (Gitea and Github) interchangeably.

Gitea is neat, and the Actions compatibility is promising. Though I’d suggest a fork, Forgejo: https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/

I want to signal boost the following quote from the URL above:

> Forgejo was created in October 2022 after a for profit company took over the Gitea project. It exists under the umbrella of a non-profit organization, Codeberg e.V. and is developed in the interest of the general public. In the year that followed, this difference in governance led to choices that made Forgejo significantly and durably different from Gitea.

If you take it at face value (at your peril), Gitea is about to start enshittification, while Forgejo will not at any point. My personal opinion, is that this is credible.

isn't that gitlab also for profit company???

They are, and always were. I think we’re more accustomized to it though, and know they won’t try to pull some shenanigans with the CE at least. I guess Codeberg didn’t trust Gitea in the same way when they decided to fork, but I think as a result Forgejo would be more sustainable, them being a nonprofit and all.

Gitlab didn’t arguably and allegedly hijack an established oss brand for their core product.

Thank you for the recommendation.

Will move to that fork in one of my future private infrastructure reconstructions.

I bounced away from Gitea because they don't (last time I checked) have OIDC. I started[0] trying to revive-and-drive a previous PR[1] to add it, but the test failures are beyond my motivation to investigate and resolve.

[0] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/33945

[1] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/25664

OIDC = OpenID Connect, an open authentication protocol

Gitea's UI is ugly.

While GitHub and GitLab have dedicated design and front-end teams to improve their UI/UX, Gitea and Forgejo aren't large enough to reach that scale, even after Gitea became a company.

For example, look at the number of issues triaged with "UX" [0] or "UX Paper Cut" [1] on GitLab. It is an order of magnitude larger than you would find in any other FOSS option.

[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/?label_name%5B...

[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/?label_name%5B...

Sorry but the GitLab UI was bad, is bad, the whole software feels clunky and slow to use and everything is nested where in comparison Gitea is simple, intuitive and straightforward, just like the old Github days. I also don't know if it's a good sign that there are a lot of UX issues?

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