I had steered away for a long while thinking it was subpar to GitHub, but it's really come a long way. Especially running it on a local network it's noticeably faster in every way than GitHub, and I'm able to build complex gitlab workflows with custom runners that are fully configurable and have effectively 100% uptime and no queues.

Yeah, if you're hosting your own just use forgejo. Forgejo has a better governance model and is actually open source, not a corporate project that happens to advertise in open source. The distinction is meaningful.

forgejo has been great for us. It scales remarkably far with the built in sqlite db also. Single binary, no deps. You ofc have the option to hook it up to a proper database server.

It’s a rails app from the early 10’s era think heroku dominance. therefore to run it you’ll need a dozen sidecars for things like redis or elasticsearch and others. it has all the fun ergonomics and bloated memory consumption of that stack as well. the all-in-one go based tools are probably better for a solo homelab style deployment (gitea etc)