Hello Forgejo, goodbye Gitlab

While Gitlab continues to be free to use, the bloat is real and the disabled enterprise features are somewhat annoying.

Gitea was on my radar for some time, but I never felt the real urge to try it out. The recent fork to forgejo caught my attention. Also, the party doing the forking: Codeberg. I already used Codeberg as an alternative for commercial git hosting platforms.

So, during x-mas break I deployed a Debian12 vm and followed the installation guide, using MariaDB as database backend. It took some time, but all in all it was not too involved and soon enough I was clicking my way through the web based configuration tool.

The thing I had not realised is that gitea/forgejo has support for runners. I expect the pipeline features to be a bit more simple than what I'm used to with Gitlab-CI, but I'm keen to find out.

So this morning I took the time to move most projects from my gitlab instance to my new forgejo instance. Playing with runners is next on the list.

From now on I will start gpp signing my commits. It seemed like a nice step up in accountability and security.