Forgejo

What is Forgejo?

Forgejo is an open source, self-hosted Git forge written in Go that bundles repository hosting, pull requests, code review, issue tracking, wikis, a package registry, and GitHub Actions–compatible CI/CD into a single lightweight binary. It began as a community hard fork of Gitea in 2022 and is now developed under Codeberg e.V., a democratic non-profit, so control of the project stays with the people who use it.

What is Forgejo best for?

Individuals, homelabs, and teams who want a fast, no-fuss self-hosted GitHub replacement backed by a community non-profit rather than a for-profit company. It fits people who care about software freedom and project governance, and anyone who needs Git hosting and basic CI/CD running on modest hardware — down to a Raspberry Pi — that they fully control.

What can Forgejo do?

• Host unlimited Git repositories with pull requests, code review, and protected branches
• Run CI/CD with Forgejo Actions, compatible with GitHub Actions YAML workflows
• Track work with issues, labels, milestones, kanban boards, and per-repo wikis
• Serve a built-in package registry for many formats (npm, PyPI, Maven, Container, and more)
• Authenticate against LDAP, OAuth2, and other external providers; manage organizations and teams
• Federate across instances over ActivityPub (a work in progress) so users on different servers can interact
• Run almost anywhere — a single Go binary or Docker container, on x86 and ARM hardware alike

Is Forgejo free?

Yes — Forgejo is completely free and 100% open source under the GPL-3.0-or-later license, with unlimited users and repositories when you self-host; you only pay for the server it runs on. There is no paid edition and no feature gate. If you’d rather not run it yourself, Codeberg — a free public Forgejo instance run by the same non-profit — hosts open source projects at no cost.

Where does Forgejo fall short?

• Federation over ActivityPub is still a work in progress, so cross-instance collaboration isn’t yet the finished, dependable feature the project highlights as a goal.
• There’s no official commercial support offering — unlike Gitea, which has a company selling support contracts and an enterprise edition — so for production you rely on community help.
• Migration is effectively one-way: moving from Gitea to Forgejo is now a real migration rather than the old drop-in swap, and moving from Forgejo back to Gitea isn’t supported at all.

What does Forgejo replace?

Forgejo is a self-hosted alternative to GitHub. It covers the same core Git hosting, pull requests, issues, and Actions-style CI/CD, but you run it on your own infrastructure with no per-seat cloud bill and no proprietary lock-in. It sits alongside Gitea — the project it forked from — and the heavier GitLab as the community-governed, lightweight option among self-hosted Git forges.

FAQ

Is Forgejo open source? Yes — fully. Forgejo is released under the GPL-3.0-or-later copyleft license and is built entirely with free software by a non-profit community. There’s no open-core edition holding features back.

Can I self-host Forgejo for free? Yes. Self-hosting is free with unlimited users and repositories; you only pay for your own server. Codeberg also offers free hosted Forgejo for open source projects if you’d rather not run it.

What’s the difference between Forgejo and Gitea? Forgejo is a community hard fork of Gitea, governed by the non-profit Codeberg e.V. and licensed under GPL-3.0 (Gitea is MIT with a commercial edition). The two share a near-identical UI but are no longer drop-in interchangeable.

What do I need to run Forgejo? Very little — a single binary or Docker container plus a database (SQLite, MySQL/MariaDB, or PostgreSQL). It runs comfortably from around 512 MB of RAM on a small VPS or a Raspberry Pi, with more headroom recommended if you enable CI runners.