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As the title states, I am looking to host maybe ~100 git repositories locally on my home network.

I’m not planning on doing anything too crazy with my repositories. The solution doesn’t need to support like 1000s of contributors however it should support the most basic features such as being able to see individual commits, branches, diffs, maybe some PR related mechanism, a web GUI, etc.

I don’t like to tinker too much. The solution should work and be stable. Stability is a hard requirement. I want to write code and not have to worry about losing it. Yes I will make backups.

Please let me know what some of the best options are at the moment. Thank you!

I personally don’t host yet anything, but do know of a friend with a functional Gitea at home

Self-hosting gitlab?

Just host a bare git repo.

Gitea is the answer, configure/install with docker. I have had mine going for a few years now and haven’t had to touch it besides updating the docker container which I automated.

I finally decided to make the move off github a couple weeks ago and ended up self hosting with Forgejo. It was really easy to set up, and my buddies and I are loving it. Provides a robust web interface and handles pull requests with automatic merges and all that. I haven’t had any issues thus far

Same, but fuck the docker overhead

if it wasn’t for the webui, a bare git repo would suffice. any repo can be a remote. it’s distributed, after all.

If you’re looking for a bare bones solution, and you already have a machine that you can SSH into, you could just use that. There are desktop GUI/TUI apps galore that you can use to inspect commits, branches and such.

At work I’m in the process of planning a move from Subversion to Git. So I’ve been looking at Forgejo, a hard fork of Gitea maintained by Codeberg. It has all the important features of other forges like GitLab and Gitea. But is completely open source.

why gitea instead of forgejo?

I’ve used Gitea before, Frogejo also looks pretty good

If all of the below doesnt work out, you can host git by itself. I did that at an office once.

https://gist.github.com/Kreijstal/28fc987270b71849505bbc89b3f2d90a steps look correct.

But for me forgejo worked out well for my side projects and mirroring.

I second the option of Git + SSH. That will scale to one hundred repos. And if you don’t want the repos to be checked out, use “git clone -n” to not do that. It’ll just be dozens of repos which only have the minimal .git/ directory. All other repos that specify this one as the upstream will have no issues pulling or pushing code.

You won’t have PR features nor a web UI though.

I’d prefer it to have a website just in case I want to take a quick look at something when I’m not home.

Forgejo is the way

Over a VPN, right? I always recommend not exposing services to the Internet if you can avoid it.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #157 for this comm, first seen 11th Mar 2026, 23:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Forgejo + Tailscale. Forgejo is the app behind Codeberg so it’s battle tested. I switched to it from Gitea after the controversy.

I’ve set up a few gitlab servers at companies and it’s always been well received. Doing it from scratch may be more complex than you want, but I think there are docker images for a more turnkey type solution. And the option of building CI/CD pipelines in the future is always nice to have.

Why forgejo I stead of gitea?

It’s monstrous, but gitlab installs from one big RPM on a base box; and with one config file you’re up.

Forgejo was soft forked from Gitea after the went commercial and changed the license (I think). If they aren’t yet, expect pay walled features eventually.

Forgejo turned into a hard fork after communication issues, I haven’t looked too deeply into it (as I don’t really care about the fact that it’s a hard fork now). This means while it used to be a drop-in replacement showing you to go back and forth between the two, it’s now an active conversion i think.

Yes.

Thanks for answering my question instead of downvoting like half the other chuckleheads. Guess I’ll migrate to Forgejo if my Gitea instance ever gets too old.

I would like to use bare repos because I don’t share with anyone else and don’t really need the web-ui for issues or wikis or anything.

However, I need git-lfs and if I understand correctly, that doesn’t wont work with a bare repo over ssh.

I was using gitea a while back and they had a way to dump repos and db, but there didn’t seem to be a way to restore. That being the case I switched to gogs which has been great. It was only recently I learned that gogs wasn’t very active and there was some kind of security breach. Mine is only accessible on my LAN so not particularly worried about security.

Anyhow, looking at forgejo now it seems like there still isn’t a great way to restore from backup? I guess that might not matter to me if I’m only interested in the repos and no comments or other stuff that might be in the database.

Relevant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)

Forgejo seemed to be the winning answer so I tried setting it up. Total setup time was less than 10 minutes.

Just a heads up… I haven’t looked at this since forever ago (when foregjo was gitea), but make sure you have a restore plan. I think there’s a dump command but no restore.

@idunnololz I'm running gitea and tailscale. Sadly I had not heard of Forgejo at the time or I might have went with it instead. (Might switch over if i get bored or an itch one afternoon). Works great for me though.

I love Forgejo, I’m glad you are happy with it too. Their upgrade process is pretty minimal/straightforward (at least it has been so far) and their runner configuration is a bit heavy to set up initially (I maybe took the security recommendations a bit too intensively despite the fact that I’m running a completely private site, but allowing systems that run arbitrary commands automatically is legitimately a bit intimidating) but has been really nice and reliable now that it’s working.

I’d go for Forjego or Gitea.

But ci/cd though

You should probably migrate now, forgejo is currently a soft fork that is fully compatible, but in the future they are planning to hard fork and not be compatible. Well, they are in the process of doing so right now.

Good to know, I’ll look into it this weekend.

Didn’t use docker then fairly sure there is a Deb for it.

just use a make file like a civilised human being

Surely this is the correct answer.

GitLab is awesome and has good CI-CD

forgejo supports woodpecker CI I thought?

Just curious - what do you mean by the docker overhead?

Jenkins has fairly solid Gitea/Forgejo integration :)

Why not forgejo’s built in ci/cd? Its worked great for me so far?

CPU, RAM, disk space, network translation, management abstraction, buried logs …

While I agree, out of the box the configs ARE NOT for home lab use.

Idk, I had not heard of gitea or forgejo before. Personally I really want strong & flexible CI/CD, and Don’t know what the alternatives have to offer there, but it would be worth looking into. GitLab is pretty resource-heavy even for low user count.

Forgejo didn’t exist when I installed gitea.

I didn’t even know that’s a thing! Looks like it’s somewhat new. What a time to be alive!

For sure. And their bumbling has made it harder to deactivate all the useless bloat and get the good web-editor back. And a host of other mind-numbingly short-sighted decisions that show they’re fully run by LostBoy coders who were never mentored and just don’t know better.

But tuning can come after. And their CI is way fucking better than forgejo’s facepalm of a GitHub clone. And that’s a thin reason, but, yeah.

Yep.

It’s like they wanna get bought to compete with GitHub or something.

They’re moving fast and breaking things. And bloating their product in the process. In the last 24 months they paid over $1M to a single bug bounty hunter who basically took them to the cleaners.

But totally agree. It’s the best UX, best product for home lab or even small enterprise use if you’ve got someone to get it tuned appropriately.