HN Explorer

Ask HN: What alternatives to GitHub are you using?

91 points by yakattak ↗ HN
Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of chatter about GitHub alternatives. I’m interested in looking into them as well but I was curious what everyone else’s experience was.

I’ve been looking at Codeberg but I’m really anxious to leave GitHub Actions behind and Codeberg’s replacement doesn’t seem ready yet.

49 comments

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nik736
Self hosted Gitea with Gitea Actions. Works like a charm for me and a team of 5.
synack
A directory called “git” with a bunch of bare repos accessed over ssh. You don’t need to make this complicated.
Catbert59
Private stuff: gitea on a cheap VPS. Will most likly migrate for Forgejo in the future. That stuff runs on a toaster.

Public projects: Github. Having no problem with it. Also makes me happy poisoning LLMs with my shitty code.

aspbee555
I have been using local hosted gitea for years for all private projects
moksha256
To me the biggest not-easily-replaceable value is the "Hub" part of GitHub. It's easy enough to stand up your own Gitea or Forgejo instance for mirroring personal Git repos, set up your own GitLab instance for more sophisticated collaboration and CI workflows, etc...but the discoverability GitHub provides in its current form, since the vast majority of repos are hosted there (or at least have some kind of mirror there) is unparalleled.
dv_dt
The defacto hub to search for projects and host projects has shifted before - it may be hard to believe now but at one time sourceforge was in github's position. Now that was a much earlier time in web collaborative repos but it could shift again.

Similar for indexes of open source repos - I dont know of a singlar winner now but it was for a bit freshmeat for a feed of open source project updates

nerdypepper
the only thing I really miss from GitHub is the social bits. it's super easy to stand up cgit etc. but you miss out on actual collab features, discover etc.

I've moved the bulk of my repos from GitHub to cgit first, but now to https://tangled.sh.

cryo
For personal projects: GIT barebone repositories + Wireguard to access them from all my devices.

OSS work is mirrored to Codeberg and SourceHut. For actions I try to make sure that local builds, and cross compilation to Windows, macOS, armhf and arm64, is always working to not soley depend on Github Actions.

doubled112
I don't have any public repos, but for private repos, I started with Gogs on a server at home, migrated to Gitea, and finally migrated to Forgejo.
icy
https://tangled.sh is an atproto (same tech as Bluesky) git collaboration platform. https://blog.tangled.sh/intro

We have a more advanced PR flow (stacking, round-based reviews), jujutsu support and we just launched our new CI system. Come join! https://tangled.sh/signup. The goal is to be the new town square for collaborating with friends and open source communities.

It's built fully in the open (https://tangled.sh/@tangled.sh/core) and we have a neat little community built around it on our Discord https://chat.tangled.sh.

Last night was a ton of fun with the sudden influx of users thanks to the GitHub news. :)

danielspace23
Just an fyi for everyone: while Tangled is built partly on top of ATProto, it differs from its component architecture widely, as the tasks that should be done by the AppView are offloaded to "knots", self-hostable servers specific to Tangled that do most of the Git heavy lifting. It violates the "user data stays on the PDS" principle, as repo data stay on knots, not in PDSes. As far as I know, no other ATProto application has a similiar architecture.
bradley13
Personally, GitLab. Really, though, use anything that is not part of the Microsoft behemoth.
sevenseacat
I've wanted to build a decent one since before GitHub even existed. Maybe today's news will be the impetus I finally need to start it.
jmclnx
I work on my local Linux system and that is the most update to date

Committed items are stored in 2 places:

1. anon ftp on sdf, back to using tar files via gopher, the main site

2. gitlab is a mirror and will make it easier for youngsters. FWIW, I find gitlab easier than github.

If gitlab starts going the way github did, I will delete my items on gitlab like I did on github a long time ago.

abound
My general rule of thumb:

- GitHub for things I expect broad collaboration on

- SourceHut for things I just want to share (or expect contributions from a specific group that are comfortable with email git flows)

- Self-hosted for everything else. This used to be Gitea, but I've recently switched to charmbracelet/soft-serve, which fits my needs well (it's small and comparatively simple)

As other folks have noted, the social features of GitHub are hard to replicate elsewhere, but I've enjoyed SourceHut's stripped back approach.

znpy
I love gitlab.
zabzonk
I loved Mercurial (still do), and despite all the bad news, Google Code. And despite even more bad-mouthing, BitBucket.
smjburton
Self-hosted Forgejo with Forgejo Actions for CI/CD. Forgejo Actions uses a syntax similar to GitHub Actions, so it's easy to transition. For my projects, I haven't had any issues. I'd suggest setting up an instance and testing it out to see if works with your projects/workflow as a replacement for GitHub/GitHub Actions.
yodon
To the people who say "GitHub for public projects, gitea (or whatever) for private projects," can I ask why?

If you're using GitHub for your public projects, why not just use GitHub period? Genuine question here.

000ooo000
To speculate, a lot of devs seem to have a 'not GitHub? Ew..' attitude. Having used the top 4 forges professionally (BB, GL, GH, AZD) I am the opposite, so I run Forgejo at home. I don't have public projects though.
Rendello
I did for many years, now I just feel a sense of revulsion to the AI AI AI marketing. Apparently they don't train on private code, so perhaps that feeling isn't logical, but it remains for me regardless.
Sunspark
Just like bots trawl the web to train AIs with, why would using different code sites be any different? If it's visible, they will still show up and scarf down the code for training material..

So, given that this will happen everywhere, does it really make a difference what MS does?