I’ve started building a small decentralized, non commercial app with a Rust backend + Node.js frontend running on k8s. I would have my own dedicated server for this. Just mentioning the setup because it might grow and for git there seem to be only GitHub and GitLab around and I prefer GitLab.
I care a lot about security and was wondering if it makes sense to self-host GitLab. I‘m not afraid of doing it, but after setup it shouldn’t take more than 1-2 hours per week for me to maintain it in the long run and I’m wondering if that’s realistic.
Would love to hear about the experience of people who did what I’m planning to do.
EDIT: Thanks for all the answers, trying my best to reply. I want CI/CD, container registry and secrets management that’s what I was hoping to get out of GitLab.
If you own a domain, hosting Forgejo on a $5 Debian cloud server works perfectly for your personal use case. My site admin panel shows it’s using 75MB of actual RAM (not allocated/virtual), it’s truly very lightweight. Disk use is very low, just however big your git repos actually are is the key.
The internal SQlite database option is just fine, don’t need to bother with PostgreSQL if you’re only doing it for yourself (the DB only holds referential info, the actual git data is stored on disk in normal git directories). There’s a built in backup command so you can build a simple shell script to run the dump command periodically and back up the entire thing to a tarball.
re: Codeberg, the only “downside” (not really) is they are for FOSS licensed projects only and frown upon using their service for your personal private non FOSS needs (they’re not draconian about it, but it’s part of the ethos the service is for FOSS licensed projects to use).
Oh thank you for the detailed answer😄
I think codeberg is for me in my case. (Btw, I barely know git, I’m gonna read a guide today.) I really like foss, so I will probably create foss stuff.
I really want to make a nas in the future, so I might host my own forgejo instance locally and possibly keep a backup on a cloud storage provider (bought 2tb lifetime on filen). I have somewhat big plans for my nas, but I don’t know what I’ll eventually do😆
So far I barely use git, so I probably dont need to rent a cloud server. Thanks again though:)
Suggestion: start learning git by using your
$HOMEconfig files as the first thing you learn how to manage; mentally easy to understand, low friction and just basic git commands needed. One of the most popular repo names we all use isdotfilesso you have plenty of examples to learn from: https://codeberg.org/explore/repos?q=dotfilesYeah, (among others) I really want to learn git to sync dotfiles and the nixos configs
(Hopefully I’ll probably have tranitioned to nixos in a few months. If I get good enough and somehow build a nas, I might use nixos instead of debian in the server too.)