I love hosting my personal git, so glad to see others do! I use it for certain projects that I just want to be lazy about (personal website with sensitive data committed to the repo) projects that are for friends/family and don’t need to be public. I chose gitea maybe 2 years ago? And it’s been great. Very light weight compared to gitlab, with useful things like actions. So I can push a new commit to main on my personal server and it’ll deploy my website to the server. I still publish things I want to share to GitHub, but not everything.

I think the thing that sets it apart from others would be I run it on a m2 Mac mini? Very low power consumption, never makes any noise, and seemingly has plenty of power for whatever I need to get done.

I have no problems publishing my public projects on GitHub or Codeberg. Secretly hoping that LLM-Crawlers will choke to dead on my bad code.

But private stuff runs on my own servers.

In 2025 it's mostly maintenance free once the setup is running: Debian will be updated fully automated using unattended-update and the hosted application when there's the need to do one manually. Backups automatically every night using Proxmox and its little brother Proxmox Backup Server. Even with valid certificates using DNS-Auth from Lets Encrypt.

> You can git clone the repo to your local machine, and you can manually move it elsewhere, but there's no way to send a PR from your repo to mine.

There is a native git request-pull command [1] that generates a summary of pending changes to pull into an upstream project, but it doesn’t enjoy support for all the features offered by GitHub pull requests or GitLab merge requests.

[1]: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-request-pull

All the drawbacks are not drawbacks to me. My projects, my repos, my private server. I don't want nor need to show off ("collaborate") and if i did.. what's the point of self hosting then? Just use github/gitlab/codeberg.

I don't even need to rent a server for that. Everything runs on my router (openWRT is amazing)

Fwiw.. I have a "normal" private git server over SSH, but for public projects, it copies merges into blessed branches to public, read-only repos accessible via HTTPS. Here's an example:

https://www.bi6.us/GI/B/

I sort of punted on receiving patches and merge requests because most of the projects I'm distributing in this way aren't really open source, but "published source" and there's a small community of people who use them. The people who use the public, read-only repos know how to generate patches and distribute them via email or (in one case) uploading them to an S3 bucket.

Anyway... your mileage may vary, but it's worked reasonably well for a small community. Not sure I would recommend it for a huge open source project.

While less popular these days, email-based workflows don't have the account/federation issue - anyone can just drop by and post a patch series. Of course the workflow itself is going to be an obstacle for most but I'm not sure if that's inherent or only because it's not what people are used to.

> 1. Leave my popular / sponsored repos on GitHub > 2. Move my smaller repos to https://git.edent.tel/

Wouldn't 2. make transitioning them into 1. "impossible"?

I think that the best way to move away from github is to go full chad and doing mailing list with patch submissions à la LKML.

gitweb + gitolite is all you need in my opinion for hosting private projects. I have had a wonderful experience with it since there are no complex databases, config files etc and it’s very light on resources

> Suppose you want to make a Pull Request or just take a copy of the code. At the moment, you have to create a fork on my server. There's no way to easily fork something to your GitHub or personal server.

Why are people so keen on having that network graph of forks? It's not necessary for collaboration. Status symbol?

GitLab is open source, you can self host it. Although the system requirements are quite high, you will not be able to host it on a two euro VPS.

And I wouldn’t be that concerned about contributors. It’s only the very top projects that get any contributors. And even then most of the time contributors are not worth the hassle.

Critical data here is how many PRs one is creating on others' projects and receiving on one's own projects. To me OP sounds like "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous." At my level of git collaboration, just git push contributions on any code forge and send me a link, and I'll do the work to pull it in wherever I am.

> You can git clone the repo to your local machine, and you can manually move it elsewhere, but there's no way to send a PR from your repo to mine

Have people forgotten that email exists?

For my private, personal Git server, I recently moved from Gitea to Soft Serve [1], and have enjoyed how light and fast it is. I have it hooked up via Tailscale (using TS_DEST_IP to forward traffic [2]), so it has its own IP on the network and I don't have services fighting for port 22.

TUI tools over SSH definitely aren't for everyone, but if that's your style and you want a place to dump all your non-public projects, it's a great choice.

Most non-private stuff goes on Sourcehut, and anyone can contribute via email (i.e. without any account) assuming they don't mind going through the arcana required to set up git-send-email.

[1] https://github.com/charmbracelet/soft-serve

[2] https://hub.docker.com/r/tailscale/tailscale

I recently began running Gitea on my NAS to host an unreal5 project which requireds significant LFS, Github's free LFS limits are very small. And honestly trying to decipher their paid account limits was too much for my old brain that day.

Anyone have experience with LFS on other repos?

I got the self-hosting bug a few years back and have been running a gitea server (among many others) on a mini PC running in my basement that is setup with tailscale so I can connect to it from anywhere, and it has been fantastic. For any OSS projects that I want to be open to the world, I still put it up on GitHub. But for anything else, it is just going on my Gitea instance.

I simply use my own githosting product for my source code products at https://GitBusiness.com

Why people self host a git site? If they're not an organization and are not looking for views, there aren't any reasons to self host.

I've tried the same thing and couldn't quite move away from the network effects of Github.

Github steals my software, the 'software conservatory' steals my software, etc.

I dont want it in a vault, I dont want you to do anything other than read it on my site. I dont want an archive. most of my code is not licensed. All rights reserved.

It's there as a personal portfolio that's it.

And these scanners don't respect the LICENSE file, they think if its on the web - they can not just index it but make full copys and reproduce it.