Forgejo is a self-hosted lightweight software forge. Easy to install and low maintenance, it just does the job.

Forgejo v9.0 is the first version to be released under a copyleft license, after a year of discussions. Among the motivations for this change is the realization that a pattern emerged over the years, exemplified by Redis, CockroachDB, Terraform and many others. They turned proprietary because people chose their own financial gain over the interest of the general public. Forgejo admins no longer have to worry about this sword of Damocles: relicensing it as a proprietary software is not allowed.

The removal of the go-git backend is part of a larger effort to make Forgejo easier to maintain, more robust and even smaller than it already is (~100MB). When presented with go-git as an alternative to Git, a Forgejo admin may overlook that it has less features and a history of corrupting repositories. It would have been possible to work on documentation and new tests to ensure administrators do not run into these pitfalls, but the effort would have been out of proportion compared to the benefits it provides.

The Forgejo localization community was created early 2024 with the ambitious goal of gaining enough momentum to sustain a long term effort. A daunting task considering there are over 5,000 strings to translate, verify and improve. There has been many calls for help in the past and the community keeps growing steadily. Fortunately, the translation hackathon (translathon) organized by Codeberg in October was exceptional. It attracted an unprecedented number of participants who improved or created thousands of translations.

    • forgejo is like github copy, and is a fork of the relatively known gitea. so far there are no federation features

      radicle is something similar, but as I understand, with distributed repo management. I don’t know the implications of this.

      radicle also has an own cryptocurrency, and is entangled with web3.
      while not all cryptocurrencies are scams, and probably the same applies to web3 projects, almost all of them are either scams, or useless for the purpose of using it as a currency. I don’t know how the radicle currency fares, but it made me distrust them somewhat when they started talking about that in their announcement channel, and the fact that since then the channel did not post much else did not help to gain back this trust

  • Ah, nice. Had been experimenting with using my Raspberry Pi 3B as my home Git server for all my personal projects - easy sync between my laptop and desktop, and another backup for the the stuff that I’d been working on.

    Tried running Gitea on it to start with, but it’s a bit too heavy for a device like that. Forgejo runs perfectly, and has almost exactly the same, “very Github inspired” interface. Time to run some updates…

    • I’m not sure it makes much sense that gitea is a bit too heavy, but forgejo (a fork of gitea) runs perfectly. But forgejo appears to have more developments momentum as a project and so you probably landed on the right choice anyway. 🙂

    •  nef   ( @nef@slrpnk.net ) 
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      17 hours ago

      Do you use it for anything other than syncing code? Currently I’m using plain SSH sync for all my personal git repos, and I’m not sure if there’d be any advantage in switching to Forgejo.

      • My workplace is a strictly BitBucket shop, was interested in expanding my skillset a little, experiment with different workflows. Was using it as a fancy ‘todo’ list - you can raise tickets in various categories - to remind myself what I was wanting to do next in the game I was writing. It’s a bit easier to compare diffs and things in a browser when you’ve been working on several machines in different libraries than it is in the CLI.

        Short answer: bit of timesaving and nice-to-haves, but nothing that you can’t do with the command line and ssh. But it’s free, so there’s no downside.

  • Has anyone have personal experience moving off of gitea and using forgejo

    I’d love to do this but it’s hard to find any written experiences yet.

    ;Edit: I will probably just try it