Update
Forgejo seemed to be the winning answer so I tried setting it up. Total setup time was less than 10 minutes. I pushed 10 repositories to test it out and so far it seems pretty good. Thank you everyone for the answers!
As the title states, I am looking to host maybe ~100 git repositories locally on my home network.
I’m not planning on doing anything too crazy with my repositories. The solution doesn’t need to support like 1000s of contributors however it should support the most basic features such as being able to see individual commits, branches, diffs, maybe some PR related mechanism, a web GUI, etc.
I don’t like to tinker too much. The solution should work and be stable. Stability is a hard requirement. I want to write code and not have to worry about losing it. Yes I will make backups.
Please let me know what some of the best options are at the moment. Thank you!
But ci/cd though
forgejo supports woodpecker CI I thought?
Why not forgejo’s built in ci/cd? Its worked great for me so far?
Forgejo + Tailscale. Forgejo is the app behind Codeberg so it’s battle tested. I switched to it from Gitea after the controversy.
Gitea is the answer, configure/install with docker. I have had mine going for a few years now and haven’t had to touch it besides updating the docker container which I automated.
why gitea instead of forgejo?
Why forgejo instead of gitea?
Forgejo was soft forked from Gitea after they went commercial and changed the license (I think). If there aren’t any so far, expect pay walled features eventually.
Forgejo turned into a hard fork after communication issues between the teams. I haven’t looked too deeply into it (as I don’t really care about the fact that it’s a hard fork now). This means while it used to be a drop-in replacement allowing you to go back and forth between the two, it’s now an active conversion, I think.
Forgejo didn’t exist when I installed gitea.
Forgejo seemed to be the winning answer so I tried setting it up. Total setup time was less than 10 minutes.
Just a heads up… I haven’t looked at this since forever ago (when foregjo was gitea), but make sure you have a restore plan. I think there’s a dump command but no restore.
Forgejo is the way
I’ve set up a few gitlab servers at companies and it’s always been well received. Doing it from scratch may be more complex than you want, but I think there are docker images for a more turnkey type solution. And the option of building CI/CD pipelines in the future is always nice to have.
I love Forgejo, I’m glad you are happy with it too. Their upgrade process is pretty minimal/straightforward (at least it has been so far) and their runner configuration is a bit heavy to set up initially (I maybe took the security recommendations a bit too intensively despite the fact that I’m running a completely private site, but allowing systems that run arbitrary commands automatically is legitimately a bit intimidating) but has been really nice and reliable now that it’s working.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access VPN Virtual Private Network
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
[Thread #157 for this comm, first seen 11th Mar 2026, 23:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Just host a bare git repo.
I’d prefer it to have a website UI just in case I want to take a quick look at something when I’m not home.
Over a VPN, right? I always recommend not exposing services to the Internet if you can avoid it.

Jokes aside, yes.
It’s monstrous, but gitlab installs from one big RPM on a base box; and with one config file you’re up.
While I agree, out of the box the configs ARE NOT for home lab use.
For sure. And their bumbling has made it harder to deactivate all the useless bloat and get the good web-editor back. And a host of other mind-numbingly short-sighted decisions that show they’re fully run by LostBoy coders who were never mentored and just don’t know better.
But tuning can come after. And their CI is way fucking better than forgejo’s facepalm of a GitHub clone. And that’s a thin reason, but, yeah.
Yep.
It’s like they wanna get bought to compete with GitHub or something.
They’re moving fast and breaking things. And bloating their product in the process. In the last 24 months they paid over $1M to a single bug bounty hunter who basically took them to the cleaners.
But totally agree. It’s the best UX, best product for home lab or even small enterprise use if you’ve got someone to get it tuned appropriately.
If all of the below doesnt work out, you can host git by itself. I did that at an office once.
https://gist.github.com/Kreijstal/28fc987270b71849505bbc89b3f2d90a steps look correct.
But for me forgejo worked out well for my side projects and mirroring.







