Gitea

Hosting open-source code on GitHub is fine, but some things you would rather not put there: internal company projects, personal dotfiles and notes, experimental code containing keys, or simply everything you have ever written sitting inside one company.

The traditional self-hosted option is GitLab — enormously capable and correspondingly heavy, with an official recommendation of at least 4 GB of RAM and more in practice.

Gitea is the light path. 57,369 stars, MIT, a single Go binary that runs against SQLite in a few tens of megabytes of memory. A Raspberry Pi, a NAS or the cheapest VPS handles it.

Coverage extends to most of what daily work needs:

• Repository hosting: HTTP and SSH push/pull, branch protection, tags, releases, LFS.
• Collaboration: issues, pull requests, code review, milestones and boards, in an interface close enough to GitHub's that a team needs no retraining.
• Organizations and permissions: teams, roles and fine-grained repository access.
• Built-in CI: Gitea Actions is compatible with GitHub Actions workflow syntax, so many existing actions run unmodified and pipelines need not be rewritten.
• Package registries for private npm, PyPI, Docker and Maven artifacts.
• Mirroring to pull GitHub repositories in automatically as backups, or push the other way.
• Migration tooling importing repositories with issues and pull requests from GitHub, GitLab and others.

To be clear about:

• The trade-off against GitLab. GitLab offers a full DevOps suite — security scanning, artifact registries, deployment environments, boards, requirements management — while Gitea covers core hosting plus light CI. Teams needing complete engineering process management want GitLab; anyone who just needs a place for code with basic collaboration will find Gitea far less trouble.
• The community forked it as Forgejo. In 2022, governance concerns following the formation of a Gitea company led part of the community to fork Forgejo, maintained by a non-profit, with near-identical functionality. If fully community-run governance matters to you, look into Forgejo. Gitea itself remains MIT-licensed and actively maintained.
• Backups are your responsibility — repository data plus the database, backed up regularly and verified restorable.
• Exposing it publicly demands care: HTTPS, disabled open registration, restricted SSH, and two-factor authentication enabled.

Who it suits: anyone wanting a private code host for a team or themselves, anyone deterred by GitLab's resource appetite, and anyone wanting a self-controlled backup of their GitHub projects.