alt Hacker NewsI've been on a somewhat binge to move a bunch of stuff to self-hosting at home. Yesterday I finally completed my self-hosted Forgejo instance at home, together with Linux, Windows (via VM) and macOS (via Mac Mini) runners/workers for CI/CD, so everything finally lives in-house (literally), instead of all source code + Actions being on GitHub but the infrastructure actually living locally.
This is probably the first time I felt vindicated with my self-hosting move literally the day after I finished the migration, very pleasant feeling. Usually it takes a month or two before I get here.
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The idea of a homelab is appealing to me, but then I actually start building one and get tired of it quickly. When I’ve been fixing broken systems at work all day I don’t really want to have to be my own sysadmin too.
I’ve got a nice and powerful Minisforum on my desk that I bought at Christmas not even switched on.
I recently did this as well and one of the things that has struck me is just how fast Actions are compared to Github!
That said, I've got Linux and macOS setup with a Mac Mini (using a Claude-generated Ansible task file), but configuring a Windows VM seemed a bit painful. You didn't happen to find anything to simplify the deployment process here, did you?
My Raspberries (and OrangePi) have better availability than github, and if were to be down I'd be out of power/internet and wouldn't be able to work much anyway.
The only problem I've found with Forgejo is a lack of fine grained permissions and also the lack of an API for pulling action invocations. The actions log api endpoints are present in gitea from what I can tell.
I moved my forge to my home, outside of a little stress getting all the containers wrangled it was pretty effortless to setup Forgejo.
I do need a good backup solution though, that’s one thing I’m missing.
I self-host Forgejo for personal and indie-startup purposes, and like it well enough.
The downside with that is it misses one of the key purposes of GitHub: posturing for job-hunting/hopping. It's another performative checkbox, like memorizing Leetcode and practicing delivery for brogrammer interviews.
If you don't appear active on GitHub specifically (not even Codeberg, GitLab, nor something else), you're going to get dismissed from a lot of job applications, with "do you even lift, bro" style dissing, from people who have very simple conceptions of what software engineers do, and why.
Self hosting was the correct solution.
6 years early [0] and you have better uptime than GitHub.
Instability aside I found several things about GitHub awkward, annoying, or missing features so I spent a month building my own. I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of this.
Interesting. I speculated not long ago that Microsoft is really taking a dive here, and other companies may look to provide better alternatives to GitHub, as one idea. Today I read your comment about self-hosting here; while that is not quite what I compared or had in mind, it is interesting to read about it, of people who go that route. Microsoft is really putting themselves into trouble in the last year or two. Some things no longer work, so much is clear here.
And once you start self-hosting, you realise how slow the 'modern' web actually is.
I host forgejo on a single NUC with a bunch of other stuff in Proxmox, the page loads in 6ms! Immich is not quite as fast but still a ton faster than Google photos.