2025-01-08
Gitea is a selfhosted FOSS git forge platform, that I started using from around 2022 to host my code.
However, around one year ago, the Gitea project was overtaken by the Gitea company, with the original project lead as CEO.
I'm personally fine with FOSS software having a company backing, however, the takeover didn't have any community consensus or even previous notice, resulting in confusion leading to community backlashes. [1]
By the way, the CEO responded with a generic answer (We will still open core our software [2]) without addressing any of the issues in the open letter, which sucks and basically breaks the trust on them.
Since I only use it to store some of my personal repos, and no other interactions are involved, I only noticed this around one week ago. Upon noticing, I made clear that I can't continue supporting Gitea in any way, so a change in git forge is needed.
Install forgejo according to official wiki. Since I'm on debian, I found their community apt packages at forgejo-contrib[3].
Forgejo should be a drop-in replacement, however, for my case, I am planning to simplify the stuff by changing DB to sqlite, so we have to migrate the repos manually.
After installation, make sure forgejo is stopped first, since the port and data may conflict.
Clone the git repositories manually from the Gitea instance
Now you can stop your Gitea service.
Then, enable push to create on your forgejo instance:
[repository]
ENABLE_PUSH_CREATE_USER = true
ENABLE_PUSH_CREATE_ORG = true
restart the service: systemctl restart forgejo
Run a bash loop to set the git remote URL to the new push address.
# Old: gitea@git.juancord.xyz:root/stuff.git
# New: forgejo@git.juancord.xyz:root/stuff.git
for i in *; do
git -C $i remote set-url origin $(git -C $i remote get-url origin | sed "s/gitea/forgejo/")
git -C $i push --all
done
Verify forgejo works (remember to enable it also), and uninstall gitea
apt purge gitea
systemctl restart forgejo
The last step is removing the old Gitea database if you're changing your default database.
Gitea community open letter, I also recommend checking out the Hacker News page, also timeline ↩
TODO ↩