2025-10-03 - Ditching GitHub
After using Bitbucket around 2014~2016, I moved to GitHub, and have been using it until now. I got cautious when Microsoft bought GitHub, as Microsoft has a past of being hostile to open-source software, but I still stayed there.
Nowadays what Microsoft does with GitHub, training AI models on open-source licensed code, is ethically and legally questionable. This is why I started looking at other (self-)hosting solutions.
I first took a look at sourcehut, I like it in terms of features and the fact that it is self-hostable. I started by getting a paid subscription at sr.ht to play around with it, but I still wanted to make sure I could self-host it.
Sourcehut is still in alpha version, and at the time of writing only has an x86 Alpine Linux package (it used to have Debian and Arch Linux packages but these are unmaintained). I'm running an arm64 Debian 13 server, so the only option I have is building it from source, which is poorly documented. Some packages it relies on also don't exist for arm64, so that is more things to build from source. In the end, it was too much of a hassle. I wish sourcehut had a simpler tech stack. I also looked in other forges such as forgejo, but they are a bit resource heavy for my server, and too much for what I need.
I ended up using gitolite with cgit, it's convenient and lightweight, especially for email-based workflow (in opposition to pull/merge requests). My git repositories are now available at git.lisible.xyz. It's a bit of work though, I add to setup a few custom commands and triggers to make it more convenient for my use case. I would probably switch to sourcehut when it gets properly packaged for Debian on arm64, but I feel like it's still a long way off (sourcehut has been in alpha since 2018).