I had been thinking of self-hosting my little repos and realised GitLab was too heavy for my taste.
Just needed a code browser.
A forum alongside with connections to the repo would be good, but again, gets heavy.
this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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A self-hosted sourcehut instance might be what you are looking for.
All features work without JavaScript
That's great
Can you use git without a forge? Sure. As long as you don't give a hoot about the entry barrier. But for any open source project were you want to encourage contribution you better have a nice presence on a forge.
i feel like this just keeps happening in the open source space, people go "Oh this is bloat, get rid of the bloat" and ardently insist that actually it's better to use a bare TTY, despite that just.. obviously being hilariously dumb?
Even just being able to view the source code without cloning is very valuable. A bare repo does not provide that.
I worked at a place that just had a git on a sftp server and that was it. Worked well in a small team. Git is made for it.
Having a separate issue tracker turned out to not be a big deal at all. Theres a lot of niceties github has, but it turns out you really dont need a whole bunch to make good software.
Nowadays i would probably go with gitea or forgeo if I had to self host, but git by itself is perfectly fine.
Did you not do code reviews? It's the main thing I would miss. Being able to comment in-line, and manage iterations, is very valuable to me.
We did. You bring down the branch and then discuss. We used jetbrains and it had a function like that. But it was a while back.
Gerrit still exists for that. Whether it's currently best, idk.
Gerrit is a hosted service, no?
You can self host it.
Their comment was about not having any hosted service though.
What does that even mean? If it's a service, it's a program running on some computer somewhere. Is that not hosting?
They were talking about hosting the git repository via sftp - so bare file transfer - a bare repository. And how that was enough for them.
While that is also hosted, and hosted through a service, it's only a file transfer service and hosting.
That means specifically without a hosted service like a forge or gerrit.
Which is why I was interested in how they handle stuff that is usually done through such forges and services / hosted software.
Oh I see. The Linux kernel has been doing fine with mailing lists (LKML) for decades, if that helps.
To anyone saying it's dumb not to use a forge, have you heard of a little open source project called Linux ? It does not use a forge either
Appreciate the KISS perspective.
For me, the project management features of a forge are extremely helpful. Setting milestones, assigning issues to them, defining timelines and regularly reiterating the planning has proven to accelerate our work as a team significantly. This experience refers to huge code bases (climate models) and medium to large team sizes, though. And probably also my bad memory 😵💫
I suppose it’s always good, though, to evaluate how much management a code will actually need in the end, and what tools correspond to that need.
Yep. Glad he's got a system that works for him, but as a solo dev I love my Forgejo. I self host it, (so no Trust issues) and if you've hosted any other services before, the setup is a simple Docker compose - so I'm not sure I accept the Heavyweight argument either.
Funny how this shows up as cross-posted to the same community when there's been a post about it two months ago.
It shouldn't be labeled "cross-"post, but the linking to earlier discussion is certainly valuable and useful.
I remembered this post.
Pretty dumb not to use a forge. Adds a huge barrier to contribution for little benefit. None of the reasons he gives make sense.
Maybe a good option for projects that you don't want anyone else to contribute to, but then why make them open source in the first place?
Not using GitHub because it's proprietary is an especially illogical stance. Virtually all websites are proprietary.
Maybe a good option for projects that you don't want anyone else to contribute to, but then why make them open source in the first place?
Because, at least to some people, open source is more about user freedom (to modify the software and share the modifications with anyone they wish) and less about collaboration.
For example every time I publish some simple utility that I wrote for myself and decided could be useful for other people, I release it under a reasonable open source license and pretty much forget about it - I'm not going to be accepting merge requests, I don't have time to maintain random tiny projects. If I ever need to use the utility for something it doesn't quite do, I'll check if any of the forks seem to have implemented it. If not, I'll just implement it in my repo.
The reason I'm publishing the code is because I know how much it sucks when you find some proprietary freeware utility that almost does what you need, but you can't fix it for your usecase on account of it being proprietary for no reason (well, author's choice is the reason, and I respect it, but it's still annoying)
That's a fair point. I don't think that's the case here because he talks about all the bad ways he prefers to receive contributions (email, patch files, git bundle etc.).
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