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Comment by troad | Hacker News Reader

What are some good alternatives for closed source codebases that people have been using and enjoying?

I only ask because I already know of good alternatives for FOSS, but it's the private / work projects that keep me tethered to GH for now.

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If it's for work, why do you need GitHub at all?

To me, GitHub only makes sense as a social media site for code. If you are publishing to GitHub with no intent to be open in your code, development process, and contributor roster, then I don't see the point of being on GitHub at all.

Because it's not like their issue tracker is particularly good. It's not like their documentation support is particularly good. It's not like their search is particularly good. It's CI/CD system is bonkers. There are so many problems with using GitHub for its own sake that the only reason I can see to be there is for the network effects.

So, with that in mind, why not just setup a cheap VPS somewhere with a bare git repo? It'll be cheaper than GitHub and you don't have to worry about the LLM mind virus taking over management of your VPS and injecting this kind of junk on you.

Very true. We have a private git repository running on a server that serves as our master. Works fine for us. We backup to GitHub. But it isn't used in any way in the dev workflow

What do you use for code review and CI/CD then?

You can do it with forgejo, just have to self-host the runners

I am excited about its potential integration with jujutsu: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/325

GitLab is quite good, the organizational features and CI is also mostly on par with GitHub. You can use gitlab.com, SaaS or self-host.

But compared to GitHub it's much more complicated in terms of UX as it covers more enterprise use cases that GitHub doesn't.

I'm a bit confused what you mean. I have to use GitLab for work and don't see much difference. Some UI elements look a bit more complex than on GH but other than that it's working the same way. Less buggy as well.

Personally I host forgejo for my private apps and have had no issues with that either.

Why do you think this? It really isn't.

It really is… I’ve worked with Gitlab for years and moving to GitHub was like a breath of fresh air, everything is much less cluttered. Not saying it’s perfect, but GitHub just feels simpler

Self-hosting. If you really need to push remotely, push to bare repo on your own cloud vm or setup gogs or forgejo.

I now start with local repos first and whatever I deem OSS-useful, I mirror-push from local to Github or anywhere else with forgejo.

Github was never really needed to use git for private projects.

I've been thinking about this. If you have any kind of home network with attached storage at all, setting your local Git to just use that seems like a logical step.

And then if you're still paranoid do a daily backup to like Dropbox or something.

Sourcehut.

Uses the same email-based patch workflow as Linux. Takes an hour to learn, and they have helpful guides: https://git-send-email.io/. No JavaScript.

Azure DevOps <shudder/>

Forgejo is super easy to set up on a 1-2 core vm. Make a compose file and put caddy in front for tls. the whole thing is less than 50 lines and costs about $10-$15 a month.

self hosted Gitea is my recommendation. has everything one needs and is super lean and resource saving. you can run it easily on a 1GB VPS - I even ran it for a while on 512MB.

I really like the end-user experience when I stumble on Gitea repos online, too.

GitLab. We self-host ours and it's rock solid.

Codeberg seems to have legs. License is different, best read it.

Gitlab.

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