Moving all my projects to Forgejo

I moved away from GitHub when Microslop bought it back in 2018, so I haven’t been affected by their recent 86% uptime (well, I have at work, but that’s another story 😅)

I moved all my development to GitLab and occasionally mirrored some repos over to GitHub when I felt people might find some value in them.

I use GitHub at work, and GitLab for personal projects, and I love GitLab. Sure, it has a learning curve, but it can do so much for you once you get used it. And I used it a lot. Back around 2019/20 I filled up my contribution graph for over a year - just on personal projects 🥇

(by the way, this may be a controversial take, but I like GitLab’s CI/CD system soooo much more than GitHub’s 🤷)

But I’m not a big-shot open-source dev, so I have the luxury of just building whatever I want, wherever I want. I don’t have to use GitHub for the sake of getting more contributors or visibility. But still, I was a bit concerned about putting all my code on a platform I don’t have any control over 🤔

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I’ve had my own git hosting server for a long time. Starting out with Gogs, then moved to Gitea when that fork was created, now moved to Forgejo after it was forked again. (Forgejo seems to be set up quite well as a company, so might not need to move again 🤞)

My normal setup was:

1. Create project in GitLab
2. Create a mirror on my local server to pull changes down as a backup
3. Do all my work on GitLab
4. Create mirror from GitLab to GitHub if necessary

My goal was to “build in public”. Which is a noble goal and has its perks. But I found that made my hobby more stressful, making me worry more about what other people might think of the things I make than about actually building the things.

The nail in the coffin was when I changed how I commit changes on personal projects so I can focus on building smaller things and building them faster - with fully automated git commits. I love this workflow. It allows me to focus so much more on just building stuff. But with that approach it made even less sense (and more dangerous) to make my repositories public. And if they aren’t going to be public, why host them on a third-party?

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So now all my code is hosted on my personal, private, git server. I even created a little CLI to easily spin up new projects 😁

I haven’t found a good way to share things from there publicly. It isn’t as easy as just mirroring the repo somewhere else, as it might contain sensitive files in the commit history. But maybe one day I will figure something out 🤔