Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

122 points by dhruv3006 ↗ HN
Github has been down consistently over the last few months - does it make sense to switch to alternatives?

365 comments

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DSCI - http://deadsimpleci.sparrowhub.io

- lightweight ( single binary written on golang ) - ci runner embedded ( podman / docker ) - pipelines are written on general programming languages - no YAML craziness - Perl/Python/Bash/Raku/Powershell/Php/Golang support - code editor

You might want to consider checking out GitLab and Gitee.
Gitee is Chinese. If you're in the US, it's considered a risk because it's Chinese. But people outside the US will not care.
That’s terrible; this shouldn’t be a barrier to using technology.
Why would people outside the US care more or less than people inside?
To people outside the USA, it's becoming harder to justify not treating American services with the same caution we treat Chinese services
Because they say you are assisting china, which they say is seeking to destroy the us
Forgejo is splendid. Codeberg is a hosted instance; depending on what you’re developing it may or may not be a good fit for you. But the Forgejo stack itself is decently light-weight to self-host, very fast to use, and is easy to navigate.
How easy is it to set up and run this for private repos?

It looks like it has so many cool features -- stacked PRs, jujutsu support, CI in Nix VMs. But I've never tried it because it sounds like (at least by default) it's some sort of decentralized, peer-to-peer public thing

Yeah, only open for public repositories until Atproto finishes their permissioned data spec.
First I've heard of this, but they seem to be a young, smart and energetic team on a great trajectory. The atproto choice is interesting, fits their social-minded goal.
I recently set this up on my homelab, not really expecting to switch to it, more out of interest. But wow, after I saw how unbelievably fast it was, I’ve moved everything over. I’ve now set it up to mirror things automatically to Github if I want to make them public.

Using Github at work is painful in comparison. (Also literally just this morning we’ve had to delay a release due to Github being down.)

Have been running self-hosted forgejo for a while now. Work's like a charm. Easy to use with LLM
I personally host a forgejo instance on a private VPS ; so far almost no maintenance except protecting it from ai-crawlers[#1]. If you don't want the hassle, codeberg.org is a public instance of forgejo.

[#1]: https://her.esy.fun/posts/0031-how-i-protect-my-forgejo-inst...

I configure my local repositories to push on both Github and my forgejo instance. I am not using the CI much for my private projects (local tests are enough in my case).

I answered this in another thread, if you're already running a large GitHub organization, GitLab is the closest alternative in terms of features

A big plus is that it also has an open-source Community Edition that you can self-host

There are also many consultancies able to provide professional support with running it in your org, including migrations.
My org self hosts the community version of gitlab and we are perfectly happy with it. Manage your own infrastructure, put the work into maintaining it and you'll have much fewer headaches.
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my favourites are sourcehut (that has excellent ci, and does not try to be a github clone) and codeberg (with slightly more straightforward migration path from github)

[0] sr.ht

[1] codeberg.org

I'm a happy paying customer of both, have been for a while. I use SourceHut for private repos, Codeberg for GH mirrors.
If you accept a non-Git VCS, Pijul Nest.
What are people using as alternatives for GitHub Actions specifically these days?
Hopefully a good spot to plug my own project, preloop, which is a drop-in replacement of Github actions(both the runners and control plane) that runs locally or self-hosted in isoalted microvms, and supports debug-on-failure. You can also push to the server, run CI and then optionally create a draft PR. Not quite production-ready yet(for the self-hosted part), but the local part works well. We implement the official runner protocol 100% unlike act/gitea/forgejo, so your workflows are more likely to work out of the box with preloop(forgejo has the closest compatibility with Github Actions though so it's a good off-Github option) and we use microvms so no DinD issues. I'm working on getting the official runner vm image up to reduce any environment incompatibilities. Feel free to try it out: https://github.com/preloopdev/preloop
Looks neat! I'll try your project if you try mine: https://getprobed.chat/
Thanks! Yours looks good too! What would you say is the difference with Slack connect? I find slack connect to be pretty painful once you have n > 50 channels
A big difference between Probed and Slack Connect is being able to create public community channels where all your users can talk to each other. You also get a feedback system, a public roadmap, and other features to help foster that community-driven growth.
If an org is heavily invested in GitHub Actions and GitHub App integrations, is self-hosting GitHub enterprise the only practical option?
Hopefully a good spot to plug my own project, preloop, which is a drop-in replacement of Github actions(both the runners and control plane) that runs locally or self-hosted in isoalted microvms, and supports debug-on-failure. You can also push to the server, run CI and then optionally create a draft PR. Not quite production-ready yet(for the self-hosted part), but the local part works well. We implement the official runner protocol 100% unlike act/gitea/forgejo, so your workflows are more likely to work out of the box with preloop(forgejo has the closest compatibility with Github Actions though so it's a good off-Github option) and we use microvms so no DinD issues. I'm working on getting the official runner vm image up to reduce any environment incompatibilities. Feel free to try it out: https://github.com/preloopdev/preloop
You could ask a quote from consultants on how much it would cost to migrate them... For large corporations it will probably be millions of euros.
i use it quite often and it has not really been 'consistently down'
I'm mostly using GitLab right now, both self-hosted and their hosted platform. But am curious about Cursor Origin and certainly plan to try that out when it's available.
Self hosted GitLab has been good to me forever and has scaled and has a controllable attack surface as long as you keep on top of it

Newer app is moving to Google Cloud Secure Source Manager (because we are on Google Cloud and using backbone auth so it made more sense and less involved to manage)

My org's GitHub Enterprise never goes down. The feature set is almost the same, though it lags a few months behind. At least you don't have to learn anything new.
I'm assuming you mean Enterprise Server (non-cloud), because my GitHub Enterprise Cloud is down right now.
I've been a Gitlab fan for a long time[0]. I typically default to GitHub for my repo slop[1], but if I'm doing something serious I put it in Gitlab. I like their CI setup better than GitHub and there's also self-host options if any of those "serious" projects ever needs that.

Also back in the day, you needed a paid account to make private repos on GitHub, but Gitlab made them free.

Anyway I haven't heard anyone complaining about Gitlab going down constantly, maybe just a function of not being the default slop-forge in the AI era, but still, they've been a long time friend to my constant hackery.

Also, Microsoft sucks.

[0]: over the years the UI has gotten a good bit more cluttered and annoying, so there's probably slicker stuff out there. But it's fine.

[1]: some of this is definitely vibe-coded LLM-vomit but I mean a more general type of slop in this case - random throwaway code, half baked ideas, etc.

I've used github for ~12 years, and it was fine for single repos, but it sucked _hard_ for any kind of organisation. It also sucked really hard for CI.

I joined a company that was using hosted gitlab. I really liked it, apart from it had the same uptime as github has now.

Features wise its about the same as github now, apart from organising repos is far simpler. Its not a flat list in an org, you can have sub teams in an org with thier repos neatly owned.

However the security story around them is not great, so I'm not really sure that I'd want to host a public instance of gitlab.

I self host Gitea and have been supremely happy with it.