Works well and is pretty straightforward.

Just set up a CI pipeline for PHP projects with a forgejo runner last week. Tried many approaches, ended up with a simple debian VM. Runner works well with docker images inside the VM, quite a flexible setup. Found this easier and better than my last tries a few years ago with gitlab, which always felt quite bloated.

I also published a blog post today about this whole journey: https://sarah-robin.com/blog/we-just-wanted-to-deploy-a-webs...

It's based on act[0] so it's quite like GitHub actions but not completely [1].

I found in the current version of Forgejo the most secure way to set it up was just to put the runner on a different host. There's a Docker in Docker setup [2] that was challenging to get working correctly but still didn't quite feel secure...

After setting it all up, I'm convinced GitHub actions as a concept is flawed. I wish the community would make a simpler git-defined CI/CD that didn't have the crazy surface area that actions does... Named shell scripts that can call out to other stuff in the runner Docker image and report it to the UI would be a nice start.

[0]: https://github.com/nektos/act

[1]: https://forgejo.org/docs/v15.0/user/actions/github-actions/#...

[2]: https://forgejo.org/docs/v15.0/admin/actions/docker-access/#...

If you know GitHub actions then you’ll immediately understand Forgejo actions. It was designed that way intentionally. There are some differences, but at least for me not enough to warrant any pitchforks.

If you have advanced use cases you might be more frustrated, but I’m not aware of any off the top of my head. I think my biggest complaint is that they haven’t exposed action logs over the API, so I can’t build tooling around them at the CLI level, feed them to an LLM, or more quickly diagnose problems that arise without using the website.

You can use any CI/CD you want. The only reason GH is popular is that it's free for public repos.

But Forgejo does have a GH like CI/CD. If you really care about good CI/CD then you should try some of the alternatives out and decide what works best for your needs.

Hooks directly into drone.io using SSO.

Self host both of them on my internal network. Technically old version of gitea which is forgejo pre-fork

Extremely yes