what is the best alternative to github ? my main requirements are that
- it should be free, and
- it should not go down or get discontinued anytime soon
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I do like codeberg a lot, but unfortunately they are harsh with taking down torrent-related projects. I had to move a few of my repos off there bc of it.
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)
All the alternatives! Gitlab is the most ubiquitous alternative in the privacy community I’ve seen. Seems to work quite well.
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)
I can vouch for GitLab. I first heard of it in the self-hosted context. If it goes down, it’ll either get the community supporting it (open source), or at the very least, a plethora of “Guide to GitLab alternatives” style-posts.
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
Ah didn’t realize there was a Phabricator successor, thanks, will add these and your comments on GitTea to the main post
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.
I’ve been looking for a p2p alternative, which would allow a simple workflow. So I had some hope when noticing radicle. But it builds on top of the blockchain hype, I’m afraid. This cryptopedia post shows things I really don’t like.
It’s true
git
itself is sort of distributed, but trying to develop a workflow on top of puregit
is not as easy. Email ones have been worked on, but not everyone is comfortable with them.A p2p using openDHT would have been my preferred approach. But any ways, I thought radicle could be it. But so far I don’t like what I’m reading, even less with whom they are partnering:
Radicle has already partnered with numerous projects that share its vision via its network-promoting Seeders Program (a Radicle fund), including: Aave, Uniswap, Synthetix, The Graph, Gitcoin, and the Web3 Foundation. The Radicle crypto roadmap includes plans to implement decentralized finance (DeFi) tools and offer support for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). With over a thousand Radicle coding projects completed, this RAD crypto platform has shown that it’s a viable P2P code collaboration platform, one that has the ability to integrate with blockchain-based protocols.
Perhaps I’m just too biased. But if there’s another p2p, hopefully free/libre SW, and non blockchain, then I’d be pretty interested on it…
Probably GitLab
Gitlab Community edition self hosted. E.g with my arm64 Docket Image. The source code can be found on my instance, gitlab and github 🙂
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.
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
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.
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
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…
I believe that their open-core business model is the biggest con. New features aren’t guaranteed to land on the free version.
I see, I wasn’t aware. Thanks for the info!
Codeberg is wonderful and also really easy to switch to from Github, as it has nice migration features.
I like to use this website when I want an alternative to what I’m using: https://alternativeto.net/software/github/
Me too! While the site itself is not FOSS, it has a handy Open source filter when looking for alternatives.
How about switching to https://www.opensourcealternative.to/ ?
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.
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.
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…
Sure, and that would attract more people for certain. Current workflows are established and work really well, too.
@Icarus surprised to not see cgit here yet. https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/
free (libre) and fast, easy to hostGitea! https://gitea.com/
Been using self hosted for about 2 years now, it’s light weight and low maintenance!
I just realized this post is from last year…
may I ask how you found it ? really curious why it’s getting comments so many months later 😅
I started using Lemmy recently… And I just saw it on my feed.
ahh, maybe it’s a bug
@Icarus You lookin for somethin to use, or run yerself?
something to use, also this is an old post lol 🙃. I eventually settled on codeberg but I’m open to suggestions
@Icarus Sorry, I saw it was old, but since it had no resolution, I figured I’d ask.
I’d say you chose wisely.