Forgejo for homelab

One of the big goals of the homelab is to run my own git forge thing so that I can have all my repos there. I already had set up Forgejo (in AWS) for LPMPL so it was kinda natural to bring it to my homelab too. I do think it is one of the better options out there, much more lightweight than GitLab and bit more user friendly for normies than SourceHut (which is awesome otherwise).

I do have some criticisms of Forgejo though:

1. It does have very aggressive release cycle. They do have LTS releases which kinda mitigates the problem though.

2. No Debian repos available. I have to manually download a binary and set it up. Which means no auto-updates or anything like that.

3. The update process is actually bit involved and it also often has DB schema changes, so it’s bit risky in that way.

4. Backup / restore doesn’t seem to be fully thought out

But the biggest problem I have is that there is no simple way to move a project from one Forgejo instance to another. I was hoping some simple export/import button or maybe some cli command but I could not find such thing. In the end I grabbed the database with pg_dump and manually copied some of the files from Forgejos data directory, but it was very ad-hoc process. The db was particularly annoying because the source instance was for some reason running v12 and the destination was v11 LTS so there were some schema changes there. It all worked out but would not recommend doing that again without better planning.

Annoyingly there is command for importing repos from GitLab and GitHub, but not from another Forgejo!

Authentication is still bit open question on how I should handle it. I’m really starting to feel that I’d want some SSO solution. For now I just have some HTTP Basic Auth on the webgw instance, but that is not really good solution.

I also want to setup Forgejo Actions at some point for some CI/CD goodness but that I’m thinking will be whole another story.