Is this a good time to mention forgejo as a self hosted alternative?
But be aware if you intend to host it you will need to protect it from recent AI web scrapers. I use anubis but there are other alternatives.
GitLab is great, I really do enjoy working with it. I hate running it.
Codeberg devs have to disable some features (pull mirrors e.g., only push is allowed to prevent abuse) and they use some custom code (abuse mitigation - spam, etc.) but in general you're getting the latest Foregjo experience "test drive" which only gets better when self hosting when you can use all the features.
Having self-hosted Gitea after considering GitLab, I can also say that the resource consumption of Gitea is a tiny fraction of that of GitLab's. I don't get the impression that their employees care about self hosters beyond as a gateway for enterprise sysadmins to get it running quickly before doing some big installation
It drives me crazy how slow it is. A lot of operations take minutes. Eg: I push commits to a branch and open an MR. During 2-3 minutes, the MR will indicate that no changes were found. When I push new changes, it can also take minutes or update, so I can’t quickly check that it all looks correct.
The latest release changed their issues UI, so when you try to open an issue, it’s opened on a floating panel on the right 30% of the screen. I’ve no idea what exotic use case this addresses, but when I click a link, just open it. The browser does it find. No need to reinvent navigation like this. Now to open an issue, I need to wait for this slow floating UI to load before I can _actually_ navigate to the page. Which will also be extremely slow.
Don’t even get me started on the UI. Buttons are hidden all over the place. Obvious links are behind obscure abstract menus. At this point, I remember where all the basic stuff is, but I can understand why newcomers struggle so much.
Hosting GitLab is also really resource intensive. For a small team of 2-3 people, I don’t think you can get away with “just” 8GB of ram.
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I do have to admit, GitLab CI is pretty good, assuming that you’re fine with just Docker support and don’t need to support BSD or some exotic platforms.
The real issue with gitea/forgejo compared to Gitlab is their terrible CI, which is (to some approximation) a clone of GitHub Actions, also a dumpster fire for those of us proficient with/preferring the UNIX command line. You'll probably need a separate CI runner, like Woodpecker or Drone.