this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2022
51 points (100.0% liked)

Open Source

31116 readers
294 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Cloak@lemmy.ml
kevincox@lemmy.ml
CrypticCoffee@lemmy.ml
Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml
51
Github alternative ? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago by Icarus@lemmy.ml to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
47 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

what is the best alternative to github ? my main requirements are that

  1. it should be free, and
  2. it should not go down or get discontinued anytime soon
all 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] cult@lemmy.ml 20 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

Let's do em all!:

  • GitHub: most mature/reliable
  • GitLab: the most popular and mature GitHub alternative. Generally seen as a more ethical alternative since it's not owned by MS and is open-sourced, but is still criticized for it's open-core business model
  • Bitbucket: the "third party" of the bunch that's no better than the first
  • GitTea: the "fourth party" that's actually cool but kinda not quite there yet. Worth keeping an eye because it's the most likely to integrate with ActivityPub soon
  • Gogs: great, but you need to self-host. GitTea is just a community hosted fork of Gogs
  • SourceForge: wow, they're still around?
  • Codeberg: centered around open-source projects only. Managed by a non-profit org
  • Launchpad: run by Canonical (Ubuntu), has a lot of other features/goals than just hosting code
  • GitBucket: a self-hostable GitHub clone written in Scala
  • NotABug: another "liberated" version of Gogs
  • Radicle: imo, one of the most interesting alternatives to look at. It's unique in that it's build on p2p technologies. Unfortunately, it seems quite coupled with many projects in the web3 space
  • Pagure: RedHat developed git forge that can be selfhosted
  • Phorge: community fork of Facebook’s internal Phabricator forge tool which was deprecated in 2011 but got a lot of things right that GitHub is often criticized for
  • Heptapod: Gitlab modified to work with Mercurial
  • Fossil: self-contained small team collaboration tool doing its own thing entirely
  • Kallithea: git and hg web frontend with code review functionality (community fork of Rhode code)
  • RhodeCode: git and hg frontend (original codebase where Kallithea forked off)
  • Sourcehut: email centric git frontend

Would love to see other people's one-liner blurbs on these as well

EDIT: added additional alternatives and comments (thanks @poVoq@slrpnk.net especially)

[–] poVoq 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Gitea is really worth looking into because it is the one most likely to get working ActivityPub federation soon. But recently there was some controversy about them forming a for-profit company and collecting VC funds, so probably places like Codeberg will switch to a community run fork soon.

[–] poVoq 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

There is also:

  • Pagure: RedHat developed git forge that can be selfhosted
  • Phorge: Community fork of Facebook's internal Phabricator forge tool
  • Heptapod: Gitlab modified to work with Mercurial
  • Fossil: self-contained small team collaboration tool doing its own thing entirely
  • Kallithea: git and hg web frontend with code review functionality (community fork of Rhode code)
  • Rhode code: git and hg frontend (original codebase where Kallithea forked off)
  • Sourcehut: email centric git frontend
[–] cult@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

Ah didn't realize there was a Phabricator successor, thanks, will add these and your comments on GitTea to the main post

[–] Daryl76679@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

All the alternatives! Gitlab is the most ubiquitous alternative in the privacy community I've seen. Seems to work quite well.

[–] Echedenyan@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

GitHub is propietary software (which goes agaisnt this community).

GitLab.com instance runs GitLab Enterprise Edition which is propietary. TeDoMun offers an instance using the Community Edition which is FLOSS.

I would recommend SourceHut (sr.ht) or Gitea (codeberg.org, git.disroot.org, etc)

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] AsepticFuturisticFox@lemmy.ml 15 points 2 years ago

Codeberg.org

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 15 points 2 years ago (1 children)

NLNet (the same org that funds lemmy development and a lot of other great open-source projects), has funded to make gitea federated, but so far there hasn't been much movement on it afaik.

Gitea is already far better than github, but because it lacks federation, you have to make tons of accounts on each different server.

[–] triplenadir@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 2 years ago

if the admin has turned on the option, folks can log in with github or gitlab or discord or a community OAuth/LDAP/etc server.

full federation will be great, but there's technically more options than just "tons of accounts" right now already.

can't find docs, but the web admin interface makes it pretty easy to set up.

[–] hfkldjbuq@beehaw.org 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

https://codeberg.org which is a non-profit organization. It is free of charge, so it is democratic enabling people to use its services. You can even join the foundation https://join.codeberg.org/

BUT it uses Gitea, which registered two for-profit companies in Hong Kong... Codeberg is soft forking it because the now Gitea shareholders / trademark owners made it clear they want to maximize profits.

If you care about promoting a democratic platform for everyone, do not use sourcehut. They will charge later on; their current free model enables both gathering users (potential clients) and making you a free tester/qa for them. I believe "financial aid" is undemocratic; free should be default. If anything, it should just require commercial, for-profit entities to pay; because then by default there is no processual need for "financial aid". We should not trust any for-profit, commercial organization anyway for such important services/platforms (version control system hosting is crucial).

From the beta onwards, unpaid accounts will be limited to read-only access to their own projects. Affected users will be emailed at least 60 days in advance of the transition. Users who host their own instance of Sourcehut, on their own servers, will be unaffected by this. Additionally, financial aid will be provided to those who cannot pay; no one is going to be priced out.

---https://sourcehut.org/alpha-details/

[–] poVoq 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I think you are doing sourcehut injustice as it is pretty much a "one guy" run service trying to make it an income generating job for himself. Asking for subscriptions is not unethical in that regard and you pretty much get what you pay for in that case.

Personally I don't like sourcehut much because it relies too much on email and selfhosting it is a mess (but it is all FOSS) so I would not recommend using it, but overall it is not a bad service.

[–] hfkldjbuq@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

He generating a job for himself is not what I criticize. I criticize promoting an undemocratic service for something so crucial that needs to be democratic which includes free service by default (otherwise you do not stand a chance against moving people out of GitHub and the like). I would never recommend to people in general a commercial and thus undemocratic service for key development (vcs).

And did it occur to you it is a "one guy" show probably because he wants it that way? That is prone to authoritarianism, and prone that sourcehut maintainer to make it a very profitable business just like GitLab and now Gitea unless founding a proper non-profit organization? A blog post about not being driven by profit is not enough; make it a proper non-profit registered organization.

In any case OP explicitly asked for a free service (which sourcehut in the future won't be).

[–] poVoq 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You are making it sound like a "non-profit" is a magical solution to running a service. All it does it adding some tax regulations and making it difficult for non-worker owners to extract rent profits. Most "non-profits" are controlled by a few people that thus can decide their own salaries and make a profit any ways.

And there is no such thing as a "free" service. Someone needs to pay for the infrastructure and operating costs one way or the other. It is just a question of how direct that payment is and if it is affordable by poorer people.

[–] hfkldjbuq@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

We have Codeberg. So there is no need in recommending sourcehut if the priority is promoting democratic services.

[–] poVoq 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Codeberg is nice overall, but I fear centralizing on them is a really bad idea (and there are signs of that happening already).

[–] hfkldjbuq@beehaw.org 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

What are the signs? Gitea federation is being worked on. The Gitea fork is needed to address the Gitea for-profit issue.

[–] poVoq 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

We are hosting 42010 repositories, created and maintained by 34042 users. Compared to one month ago, this is an organic growth rate of +3372 repositories (+8.7% month-over-month) and +2271 users (+7.1%).

https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-hackathon-translation-service-more.html

I hope Gitea federation will reduce this trend, but for now this centralisation is not good at all.

[–] hfkldjbuq@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

An issue I see is that public instances are not properly announced/listed.

and for sourcehut, i could not find anything.

[–] triplenadir@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 2 years ago

another vote for Gitea - much easier to host than gitlab in my experience, lots of great features (e.g. it can work as a single sign on system for other apps, host docker images and PHP packages, and integrates well with Drone for CI/CD), and if you don't wanna run it yourself I'll also big up Codeberg as another person suggested

[–] yeolsongarak@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I like to use this website when I want an alternative to what I'm using: https://alternativeto.net/software/github/

[–] Tiuku@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 years ago

Me too! While the site itself is not FOSS, it has a handy Open source filter when looking for alternatives.

[–] ravermeister@lemmy.rimkus.it 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Gitlab Community edition self hosted. E.g with my arm64 Docket Image. The source code can be found on my instance, gitlab and github 🙂

[–] johnnymojo@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

You can get a public ip address for it if you want to share/collaborate using noip or similar service and a few minutes setting up your router.

[–] independantiste@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

I am starting to get annoyed by Lemmy's Active and Hot feeds recommending not things that are Hot or Active but instead threads from over a year ago with ONE new comment

[–] shiham@lemmy.shihaam.me 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Gitea! https://gitea.com/

Been using self hosted for about 2 years now, it's light weight and low maintenance!

[–] shiham@lemmy.shihaam.me 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just realized this post is from last year..

[–] Icarus@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

may I ask how you found it ? really curious why it's getting comments so many months later 😅

[–] shiham@lemmy.shihaam.me 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I started using Lemmy recently... And I just saw it on my feed.

[–] Icarus@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

ahh, maybe it's a bug

[–] weeezes@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 years ago

sourcehut

[–] Dubois_arache@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 year ago

Self-hosted Gitlab.

[–] metacolon@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 year ago

Codeberg is wonderful and also really easy to switch to from Github, as it has nice migration features.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Lots of people say Sourcehut, and I agree. It may not always be free, but I believe it's still free for OSS projects. All of the sourcecode is available, and the instructions for running your own servers is decent. It's been around for years, and I'd be surprised if it went down; it's never had an outage as long as I've been using it.

It has source repos, issue tracking, CI, mailing lists, and wikis. The pages are also lightweight, with little to no javascript.

You might find it ugly. It has no web-based PR/merge tooling (but has instructions on how to manage PR/merging using the mailing lists). It has a couple of restrictions on what kinds of projects you can host with gem (no cryptocurrency projects). It's a developer's tool, and built for people who have a fair amount of competency outside of web interfaces.

I love Sourcehut; I've been paying for it since before I needed to, and even though I'm not using it for commercial purposes... but it's not for everyone.

[–] jbowen@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago

I think the site is clean and pretty. I've also been paying for it for a couple of years now ($2/mo, I think). Hosting costs need to be covered somehow and if you're not paying for it, then it's likely data about you is being sold in some way.

[–] kixik@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

well, it seems soucehut will have a web based work flow, or so it seems from this postmarketos post:

We talked to Drew DeVault (the main developer of SourceHut) and he told us that having the whole review process in the web UI available is one of the top priorities for SourceHut

...

SourceHut is prioritising to implement an entirely web-based flow for contributors.

This things don't happen in one day, so don't hold your breath yet, but it seems it's coming at some point...

[–] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 2 years ago

Sure, and that would attract more people for certain. Current workflows are established and work really well, too.

[–] cult@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

What's wrong with GitLab? Definitely the most mature alternative.

If you're really interested in something that will not go down or get discontinued anytime soon, I'd also suggest taking a look at Radicle which is P2P and free

[–] Tiuku@sopuli.xyz 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I believe that their open-core business model is the biggest con. New features aren't guaranteed to land on the free version.

[–] cult@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

I see, I wasn't aware. Thanks for the info!

[–] musicmatze@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

GitLab was known to be a resource hog not too long ago. I cannot comment on its current state, as I don't use it, but someone I know has to maintain an instance with a few developers and they have a cronjob to kill the system and reboot it every once in a while because GitLab eats the system if not restarted every once in a while...

[–] eshep@social.trom.tf 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@Icarus You lookin for somethin to use, or run yerself?

[–] Icarus@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

something to use, also this is an old post lol 🙃. I eventually settled on codeberg but I'm open to suggestions

[–] eshep@social.trom.tf 2 points 1 year ago

@Icarus Sorry, I saw it was old, but since it had no resolution, I figured I'd ask.
I'd say you chose wisely.

[–] mononokay@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Probably GitLab

[–] tun@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I use gitea.

Edit: remove bitbucket which is not open source.