Comment by sho_hn
16 hours ago
> Github has always been non-free software hosted by someone else, and run according to its owners' rules and for its owners' benefit, not ultimately the end user. This was true in 2008 and it's true today.
Yup. At KDE we never seriously considered GitHub. We always built our own git infra, and eventually landed on GitLab, after banding together with Gnome and a (generous and forthcoming) GitLab to convince them to move everything we needed from the Enterprise Edition to the free software Community edition.
I think we've had exactly one multi-hour git outage in 16 years.
GitLab cloud lost some of my projects. And it was (is?) quite slow. Props to those who can keep it running self hosted.
I kept a Docker install of GitLab running for many years at my first full time employer out of university back in 2014 to 2020. It was really not too difficult. Every once a while they would release a major version that required a migration or config update, but mostly the updates were a docker compose pull and docker compose up away. At our single company scale with only some 25 developers max (don't remember exactly anymore) a self-hosted instance on a moderate VM was super stable and quite boring. And boring is often good. It might be that hosting GitLab for much bigger organizations is a different beast!
I remember that the first instance of their CI solution was a separate server/service that coordinated CI jobs on runners. That was a bit cumbersome. But then they integrated the CI coordination into the main server and you only needed to figure out the CI runner part.
Today I would likely have gone for Forgejo with runners for such a small company if I were to self-host. Less moving parts and smaller footprint.
Just moved our stuff from gitlab to forgejo. Gitlab is fine. Just too much stuff for a small org. And I hated the upgrades. And they kept adding things and none of those were what I wanted :) guess a different audience or something. very good to have some options though!
It can be run as a single docker container, so it's actually very easy to self host. Occasionally it'll get into a 500 conniption and needs a restart, but you can create a healthcheck for that.
It's actually much faster when self hosted, even on modest hardware. And it's not _that_ bad to manage with docker (for how much it provides).