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Forgejo test drive

When it comes to Git hosting there are two services that are de-facto standard within their field: While GitHub is perfect for FOSS projects that are out in the open, GitLab is running on most companies on-premise infrastructure. I’ve been using both of them for well over a decade now and rarely check alternatives (besides BitBucket, but let’s not talk about BitBucket please…).

But there are a few more tools nowadays and I thought why not give one of the more popular options a try.

Within this post I’d like to check out Forgejo, a free-as-in-freedom fork of the popular Gitea.

Setting up Forgejo #

For this test I’ll set up Forgejo using a docker-compose.yml on my local system. It’s as simple as this:

version: '3'

services:
  forgejo:
    image: codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo:9
    container_name: forgejo
    restart: always
    ports:
    - '3000:3000'
    - '222:22'
    environment:
    - DB_TYPE=sqlite3
    - DB_PATH=forgejo.db
    volumes:    
    - ./forgejo.db:/forgejo.db
    - ./forgejo:/data
    - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
    - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro

Start it with docker compose up -d and the service can be reached at http://localhost:3000. Now you just need to set it up real quick:

  • Go to http://localhost:3000
  • Check through the configuration options, most of them are good defaults
  • Add an admin account or enable self-registration
  • Save the config and Forgejo will set itself up

Now you’re good to go!

First impressions #

At first sight the UI looks very minimalistic and clean. Before even creating my first repo I can already see that most common features are there: There’s a user profile page along with user activity. I can reach repos and pull requests easily. There seem to be a project planning feature, as there’s a menu item called milestones and lastly it’s possible to bundle repositories under the umbrella of organizations.

forgejo

Within the profile there’s a section called packages which points to Forgejos ability to host artifacts within their native package formats. GitLab and GitHub have the same, but they’re lacking in functionality. Especially with GitLab due to some strange design decisions the package feature is not really usable compared to full-featured artifact hosting services like Artifactory or Nexus. I’m speaking about generics not being able to be stored in subpathes for example.

When creating a repo all the expected options are there. I saw that it’s possible to use repository templates, but couldn’t find any docs. The Gitea documentation looks promising though. It won’t be as powerful as using a service like Backstage, but it’s good to have a templating mechanism when it comes to building a dev platform.

What I’m missing is something like GitHub Pages, although it seems Codeberg (a Git hosting SaaS provider based on Forgejo) built it as an extension.

For the time being I won’t go much into Forgejo Actions, as there’s already Jenkins on my Todo-list. We’ll find some time later on to check on that as well.

Typical workflow #

Next I was going through the typical dev workflow:

  • Clone a repo
  • Create a new feature branch
  • Do some changes
  • Push the branch
  • Create a Pull Request
  • Review and merge that request

Everything was working well, in fact it was feeling a bit too much like GitLab. They even have the feature to prepend WIP to the PR title to mark it as work in progress.

The UI to perform the code review is pretty good and has all the needed features:

forgejo_pr

Conclusion #

Overall the UI looks nice and tidy. It has all the needed features without feeling bloated. Surely GitHub and GitLab have a ton of more features, but that’s one of Forgejos main selling points: You don’t need most of that - Forgejo provides what’s really important to create software efficiently. I don’t have much going on in my local instance, but looking at docker stats shows that it runs very lightweight in comparison to an empty GitLab.

For the time being it’s a good base for further local tests and I’m happy with the result.