alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: Alternatives to GitHub
Github has been down consistently over the last few months - does it make sense to switch to alternatives?
Comments
Forgejo is great to self host. I have an easy to use template for setting it up on fly.io with backups here: https://forgejo-fly.fly.dev/forgejo-admin/forgejo-fly
I answered this in another thread, if you're already running a large GitHub organization, GitLab is the closest alternative in terms of features
A big plus is that it also has an open-source Community Edition that you can self-host
I migrated everything to codeberg several months ago (and created an annual donation schedule). I was never a big fan of github but what ultimately pushed me to ditch it was the way github was shoving copilot/chatgpt in my face without me ever asking. Codeberg has a clear stance on that and it's a stance I can totally get behind.
In addition I spun up forgejo at a server at home for very critical stuff and it's awesome.
I've used gitlab and gitea; gitea is faster, and easier to manage and does everything I actually need though, is less feature complete.
I moved recently to Gitoro with private projects, but do not have any meaningful opinion about it yet. It works for me, it’s fast, nothing to complain about. Just mentioning it here as EU-hosted alternative.
Self hosted GitLab has been good to me forever and has scaled and has a controllable attack surface as long as you keep on top of it
Newer app is moving to Google Cloud Secure Source Manager (because we are on Google Cloud and using backbone auth so it made more sense and less involved to manage)
I'm working on self hosting Gitea right now. Hopefully it goes well!
I use Forgejo + Gitea for my home forge, then Tangled for anything I want to share with my own runner.
I self host Lore for my gamedev projects.
I self host Forgejo on a cheap VPS with hourly borg backups to rsync.net. It's a great system and seems comparable to github, although I'm not a heavy user of actions on either platform. I do use the container registry though. It was a smooth transition and easy to install. I used the docker installation method. Forgejo is great if you don't mind hosting yourself.
how has nobody mentioned https://codeberg.org ?
it gives you the obvious gitHub alternative: open-source, community-owned, privacy-respecting, non-corporate, and not built around turning your development workflow into a Microsoft-owned platform.
DSCI - http://deadsimpleci.sparrowhub.io
- lightweight ( single binary written on golang ) - ci runner embedded ( podman / docker ) - pipelines are written on general programming languages - no YAML craziness - Perl/Python/Bash/Raku/Powershell/Php/Golang support - code editor
Forgejo is splendid. Codeberg is a hosted instance; depending on what you’re developing it may or may not be a good fit for you. But the Forgejo stack itself is decently light-weight to self-host, very fast to use, and is easy to navigate.
I strongly disagree with the assumption that GitHub's alternative is another centralized forge. Git itself is perfectly decentralized, as was the original Linux kernel development process. How people managed to put all their eggs in one intermittently available service is beyond me. Moving the eggs into another bucket is not a solution (like Microsoft is short of servers). The SPoF is the problem. There are plumbing, porcelain and "github" layers. The "github" part has to be decentralized as well. Then, using a particular forge will be a choice of convenience, not necessity. https://replicated.live/blog/crdt
my favourites are sourcehut (that has excellent ci, and does not try to be a github clone) and codeberg (with slightly more straightforward migration path from github)
[0] sr.ht
[1] codeberg.org
I moved to gitea + ec2 spot for actions w/ mirroring to GH for the time being.
I'm mostly using GitLab right now, both self-hosted and their hosted platform. But am curious about Cursor Origin and certainly plan to try that out when it's available.
I personally host a forgejo instance on a private VPS ; so far almost no maintenance except protecting it from ai-crawlers[#1]. If you don't want the hassle, codeberg.org is a public instance of forgejo.
[#1]: https://her.esy.fun/posts/0031-how-i-protect-my-forgejo-inst...
I configure my local repositories to push on both Github and my forgejo instance. I am not using the CI much for my private projects (local tests are enough in my case).
If only there was a convention for storing PRs and issues and wiki inside the repository itself, similar to how Fossil[1] does it.
Then all the GitHubs and Gitlabs of this world would be limited to just providing UI and would be unable to hold our data hostage by design.
radicle.xyz to avoid centralization again
Ironically hosted on Github Gogs is a self-hosted forge : https://github.com/gogs/gogs
What are people using as alternatives for GitHub Actions specifically these days?
My org's GitHub Enterprise never goes down. The feature set is almost the same, though it lags a few months behind. At least you don't have to learn anything new.
What part of github that's so sticky?
For me it's action and PR history.
My org self hosts the community version of gitlab and we are perfectly happy with it. Manage your own infrastructure, put the work into maintaining it and you'll have much fewer headaches.
My org uses a self-hosted instance of RhodeCode Enterprise. It's not as feature rich as GitHub, but it's worked well for us.
If an org is heavily invested in GitHub Actions and GitHub App integrations, is self-hosting GitHub enterprise the only practical option?
some european alternatives : https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/github
I've been a Gitlab fan for a long time[0]. I typically default to GitHub for my repo slop[1], but if I'm doing something serious I put it in Gitlab. I like their CI setup better than GitHub and there's also self-host options if any of those "serious" projects ever needs that.
Also back in the day, you needed a paid account to make private repos on GitHub, but Gitlab made them free.
Anyway I haven't heard anyone complaining about Gitlab going down constantly, maybe just a function of not being the default slop-forge in the AI era, but still, they've been a long time friend to my constant hackery.
Also, Microsoft sucks.
[0]: over the years the UI has gotten a good bit more cluttered and annoying, so there's probably slicker stuff out there. But it's fine.
[1]: some of this is definitely vibe-coded LLM-vomit but I mean a more general type of slop in this case - random throwaway code, half baked ideas, etc.
cursor are launching a new one soon - https://cursor.com/origin
A big thing with Github its the unified functionality across most of the OSS world - that we can search across all projects, leverage pipeline actions from other projects, and easily have a single dashboard for our own contributions and interests across all projects.
I'd hate to see a move to forge balkanization lose this functionality. But this would not be heavyweight data to federate. So are there any forges with a good story for federation?
Recently:
GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49135365
Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives
use codeberg if you're ok with never using ai in any of your projects. Any AI use and your repo is banned. - https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
We're moving over to self-hosted forgejo. Interface is roughly similar, featureset is roughly similar enough.
I self host Gitea and have been supremely happy with it.
If you accept a non-Git VCS, Pijul Nest.
It is time to switch to self-hostable alternatives.
It made sense 6 years ago as I said before [0], today it makes even more sense to self host with GitLab, Gitea or Forgejo.
...Or we can repeat the same issues again with Cursor Origin [1].
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i use it quite often and it has not really been 'consistently down'
To all of those proposing self-hosted GitLab: we did it for 6+ years in my company, and it's not always a smooth sailing. We had our own runners and we made it auto-upgrade across docker images daily before business start. It mostly worked really well, except those few times were a Docker upgrade had to be rolled back, or that one time the bundled pg_shared_buffers was set at 1MB by default, making schema upgrades impossible for bigger instances, or a version major would break pipeline expectations forcing to upgrade 200+ repos at a time (we pinned to major afterwards). Lately I was also receiving an almost weekly "critical patch" newsletter due to critical/high vulnerabilities, which I can only imagine are due to LLM running over the code and identifying bugs.
That said, I wish we hadn't migrated to GH, our self-hosted instance had WAY less downtime despite being perhaps a bit slower (mgmt saving money) and required a bit more toil: GH is nowhere near Enterprise-ready and it feels a downgrade across the board. GL has better access granularity, better docs, better integrations, and you can clearly see the UI received a lot of attention (although it does take 10m with a new account to pin the proper items in the maze of sub-menus that is the sidebar). You can also look at the code and help out if needed, and/or simply provide a patched version to your image via a docker mount.
If you're really looking at self-hosting GitLab for a smallish team (up to 50-100 ppl), prepare at the very least a 16GB machine (best 32GB) with 4 cores and a decent SSD, and at least a small team (1-3 people) that can maintain it properly or jump at it at any moment. For runners, a small k3s cluster is ideal to make use of all the resources you can throw at it without worrying about managing the runner state/configuration.