Forgejo
| License | FOSS problems | Maintenance | SSO | Users | Tested |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MITPermissive license. Preserve the copyright notice. Applies only to the covered code — your surrounding project can stay under any license. | — | Active | ✅ | Unlimited | ✅ |
Description
Forgejo is a self-hosted git forge — a GitHub alternative for hosting code repositories, issues, pull requests, and CI/CD pipelines. A community fork of Gitea, governed independently and fully FOSS, with an interface and feature set very close to GitHub's.
Features
- Repositories, issues, and pull requests — the standard git-forge set, close enough to GitHub's own that the transition needs no relearning.
- CI/CD pipelines — Forgejo Actions, a GitHub Actions-compatible runner, for building and testing directly off a push.
- Web-based editing — markdown files editable straight through the browser, no local git setup needed, useful for non-technical contributors.
- Package registry — hosts built artifacts and packages alongside the code that produces them.
Usage patterns
- Version control for code — the obvious use, and the baseline this project's own source is hosted under.
- Backbone for anything git-shaped — documentation sites, configuration files, static site content, not just software in the traditional sense.
- Paired with a deployment platform — Coolify can deploy directly from a Forgejo repository: push to Forgejo, Coolify rebuilds and deploys automatically.
License and governance
MIT, genuinely open, no dual-licensing gate. A community fork of Gitea specifically created to stay independently governed — not tied to a single company's roadmap or a foundation that could change direction on its own, which is the whole reason the fork happened in the first place.
Conclusion
Why you would — a self-hosted GitHub alternative with a near-identical feature set, independently governed, and a natural pairing with Coolify for git-triggered deploys.
Why you wouldn't — real operational overhead: another service to maintain, back up, and keep updated. If the only use case is deploying a single static site with no active development happening, it may be more than needed — a lighter option like GitHub or a direct deploy from a local machine could cover that alone. That said, having a self-hosted git forge in place lowers the barrier to whatever gets built next, rather than needing to stand one up later.