Codeberg and Forgejo
Codeberg and Forgejo
I finally gave Codeberg a try after hearing about zig moving over. It’s a nonprofit git forge running Forgejo, which is a community fork of Gitea, which was a fork of Gogs. The lineage is messy but the result is clean: a fast, simple git hosting platform that isn’t GitHub.
Why bother?
GitHub works fine. But it’s Microsoft, it quickly became a monoculture, they wanted to charge people for their own self hosted runners, and quickly walked it back. Having alternatives matters even if you don’t use them daily.
Codeberg is run by a German nonprofit. No ads, no tracking, no “Copilot learned from your code” surprises ( hopefully ).
Forgejo is lightweight, pages load fast, the UI stays out of your way. It feels like GitHub circa 2012, before they added social features nobody asked for, or added a slower, crappier web based version of visual studio code, which is already really slow.
What I put there
Two small projects that felt right for a quieter home:
tin-box, 5 minute dev boxes, or whatever else, Bash scripts wrapping the Vultr CLI. Spin up a $5 VPS, generate SSH keys, configure everything, connect automatically. Then copy over dev environment scripts for TypeScript, Python, Rust, Go, or Elixir. Zero to working remote dev box in under 5 minutes.
webring.social, A webring server in Rust. No JavaScript, pure HTML, server-side redirects. SQLite backend, SSH tunnel admin, production configs for nginx and fail2ban included. Because webrings should come back and well why not make another hobby version.
First impressions
Registration was instant. The interface is familiar if you’ve used GitHub or Gitea. Push worked, issues work, the web editor works. Nothing flashy, nothing broken.
The community is smaller, which is either a downside or the whole point depending on what you want, and i heard they run on a shoe string budget with busted laptops as servers.
I also tried deploy my own forejo, and added podman runners, and yeah, it like just worked.
I liked it. Two thumbs up.