Fancy A Cup of Gitea anyone?

GitHub is brilliant and I'm not telling you to leave it. But for your own repositories — the personal projects, the homelab, the private stuff — hosting your own Git forge is easier than you think, and Gitea is a lovely cup of it.

Why leave GitHub at all?

A few reasons that add up: you'd rather your private code lived on infrastructure you own; you're uneasy about it being training fodder; you want to escape per-seat pricing for a team of mates; or you just like the idea of the whole thing running on a box in your house. None of these are urgent. All of them are reasonable.

Gitea is tiny

It's a single Go binary. It'll run happily on a Raspberry Pi, sips memory, and stores its data in SQLite if you don't fancy standing up a Postgres. Installation is genuinely "download the binary, point it at a folder, done". For something that replaces a chunk of GitHub, the operational weight is almost nothing.

What you actually get

Repositories, pull requests, issues, a web UI, packages, and Gitea Actions — which is close enough to GitHub Actions that a lot of workflows port across with minor tweaks. For personal and small-team use it covers ninety percent of what you reach for on GitHub day to day.

What you give up

The network effect, mostly. No drive-by contributors, no "star on GitHub", none of the vast ecosystem of third-party integrations that assume GitHub. That matters enormously for an open-source project you want strangers to find and contribute to — and not at all for your private homelab repos. Match the tool to the job.

For your own stuff, on your own box, a cup of Gitea hits the spot.