alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: Alternatives to GitHub
Github has been down consistently over the last few months - does it make sense to switch to alternatives?
Comments
some european alternatives : https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/github
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A complete DevSecOps platform: Git forge, CICD pipelines, Private Registry, Issues/Planning, self-hosted or cloud.
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Maybe the big cloud’s git solutions? Not to say the are good alternatives, but for teams already on the clouds, they could be a easier migration with somewhat feature complete, uptime, security promises that execs are looking for.
At work, we have repos on GitHub and Azure DevOps. Today, GitHub went down, but our repos (including PRs, CIs) worked as normal on Azure DevOps
Has anyone tried Tencent CNB? It offers generous free quotas.
AWS CodeCommit + CodeBuild. All day long.
You might want to consider checking out GitLab and Gitee.
I've been a Gitlab fan for a long time[0]. I typically default to GitHub for my repo slop[1], but if I'm doing something serious I put it in Gitlab. I like their CI setup better than GitHub and there's also self-host options if any of those "serious" projects ever needs that.
Also back in the day, you needed a paid account to make private repos on GitHub, but Gitlab made them free.
Anyway I haven't heard anyone complaining about Gitlab going down constantly, maybe just a function of not being the default slop-forge in the AI era, but still, they've been a long time friend to my constant hackery.
Also, Microsoft sucks.
[0]: over the years the UI has gotten a good bit more cluttered and annoying, so there's probably slicker stuff out there. But it's fine.
[1]: some of this is definitely vibe-coded LLM-vomit but I mean a more general type of slop in this case - random throwaway code, half baked ideas, etc.
forgejo for hosting, woodpecker for CI/CD.
Hopefully forgejo gets federation in the near future because öets face it, opening an issue on Github is easy because you have an user there but you wont get one on my private forgejo instance. Also, a tool like gh for forgejo would be nice.
If you want to have an easy way to setup, have a look at https://yunohost.org/ that also offers lots of other nice stuff in its "app store" -> https://apps.yunohost.org/
Like others I migrated from github to codeberg. But since lots of my projects are coauthored with Claude I moved to self hosting Forgejo on a small Hetzner instance which also does some static hosting. So far working well. I think some cross platforms stars and search would be good.
to your actual question, no, it really doesn't make sense. The problem is you are saying it is down consistently.... and it's not. You can switch if you want, but from my observations, it's not really that often, and those that do switch make a bunch of compromises when they do. I'd only consider it once you actually measure the impact to your business. Based on actual data and not feelings, then consider whether it is worth it given all the costs of switching. We use it all the time and at most, may have had 30 minutes where we were stuck.
how has nobody mentioned https://codeberg.org ?
it gives you the obvious gitHub alternative: open-source, community-owned, privacy-respecting, non-corporate, and not built around turning your development workflow into a Microsoft-owned platform.
I moved recently to Gitoro with private projects, but do not have any meaningful opinion about it yet. It works for me, it’s fast, nothing to complain about. Just mentioning it here as EU-hosted alternative.
I do not think most would switch because of the switching costs. This applies to paying customers.
https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/what-stripe-can-become-broader-...
I have been hosting gitea for our small org (docker + sqlite) for close to 5 years now. ~50+ repos, some large. All upgrades, including major changes, have been as easy as just changing the tag and reloading the container.
If you want to try something a little bit more off the beaten path, https://gitworkshop.dev/ is a code forge built on nostr
I moved to Codeberg months ago in response to GitHub's unreliability, poor moderation and random/illegitimate takedowns, and overuse of AI.
Have never regretted the switch + I love the no AI policy.
https://repo.autonoma.ca/treetrek
I self-host using my own read-only, FOSS, pure PHP Git repository reader for personal projects.
What are people using as alternatives for GitHub Actions specifically these days?
Origin by Cursor probably will be future Software.
If only there was a convention for storing PRs and issues and wiki inside the repository itself, similar to how Fossil[1] does it.
Then all the GitHubs and Gitlabs of this world would be limited to just providing UI and would be unable to hold our data hostage by design.
Can recommend https://codefloe.com
My org self hosts the community version of gitlab and we are perfectly happy with it. Manage your own infrastructure, put the work into maintaining it and you'll have much fewer headaches.
Ironically hosted on Github Gogs is a self-hosted forge : https://github.com/gogs/gogs
I'm running gitea successfully with very little resources.
Mostly of recommendations only have linux runners, I need windows and macOS.
Any recommendations?
Forgejo/Gitea is lightweight and easy to setup.
don’t switch reactively, but use the outages as a trigger to evaluate alternatives and make sure a GitHub outage doesn’t stop critical work.
If an org is heavily invested in GitHub Actions and GitHub App integrations, is self-hosting GitHub enterprise the only practical option?
My org uses a self-hosted instance of RhodeCode Enterprise. It's not as feature rich as GitHub, but it's worked well for us.
for local Canadian based workflows that want sovereignty, I recommend https://about.worktree.ca
Recently:
GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49135365
Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives
What part of github that's so sticky?
For me it's action and PR history.
I guess we need a simpler alterntive to github
cursor are launching a new one soon - https://cursor.com/origin
My org's GitHub Enterprise never goes down. The feature set is almost the same, though it lags a few months behind. At least you don't have to learn anything new.
selfhosting gitea has been a great experience for me, its open source
Whatever you do, you should self-host it. Then you aren't going to be at the mercy of some third party when they start to get hammered by vibe coders doing an insane amount of traffic. Forgejo is a great option if you want something git-based. I'm personally very partial to Fossil, it works well and is dead easy to set up.
forgejo, self hosted. Dead simple to host, even have it integrated with my pocket id so it’s one less password I have to remember.
We're moving over to self-hosted forgejo. Interface is roughly similar, featureset is roughly similar enough.
A big thing with Github its the unified functionality across most of the OSS world - that we can search across all projects, leverage pipeline actions from other projects, and easily have a single dashboard for our own contributions and interests across all projects.
I'd hate to see a move to forge balkanization lose this functionality. But this would not be heavyweight data to federate. So are there any forges with a good story for federation?
I self host Gitea and have been supremely happy with it.
What about a mailing list and `git format-patch`?
Old skool is best skool... There is wisdom in keeping these decoupled:
- 1. your central code review (and hosting), which is the critical choke-point on team collaboration.
versus
- 2. the ever-expanding ick of testing, building, deploying it etc... because failure modes of software construction infra are concentrated here.
---
Use Gerrit if you care about code review.
Code review workflow is the nub / hub of collaboration, and should never be blocked on anything else failing, including itself. Maintaining robust in-house code review infra. is work, yes, but it is quite manageable. Simple "single-box with full point-in-time snapshot recovery" designs will remain good for a long, long time... Think; workloads of teams of up to a few hundred programmers and bots, who would be pushing and pulling updates against multiple repositories at a time on a single, well-endowed, Gerrit box.
2. CI/CD: Use whatever works best economically.
Be it one giant in-house box running Jenkins, or a clever way to use github and gitlab's job infra as fallbacks for each other.
These systems fail often because pretty much all the ick of software construction is concentrated here. Be it simple test runners, or fancy end-to-end auto-deploy to rollback pipelines.
The mind-numbing ick of software supply chain dependencies, test run jobs, build jobs, failures / retries, bursts of high contention (lots of people / bots needing their test runs passing NOW), pulling and pushing artefacts, and so forth.
This is a true pain to manage, particularly in organisations that are laissez-faire about their software ecosystem ("best tool for the job" mentality etc.).
And on a personal note...
--- <begin rant> ---
As if trusting enterprise chat SaaSes with all your company secrets wasn't bad enough. At least that has some contractual defensibility.
Had. Had... Now? Something is deeply wrong with people who aren't completely spooked by the current fad of letting hyperscalers steal literally everyone's data to make content and code re-production autobots. Based on how those companies have behaved from the get-go, and factoring in the overwhelming pressure the LLM industry has created to "become the biggest, no matter what, because biggest wins"; their "terms of service" are as good as their high-flying CEO's mood on a given day.
No thanks.
Besides, it's only been a hot minute since I adjusted to that other fait acompli of 21st century computing.
They who controleth thy hypervisor, controleth thy destiny.
--- Ye Olde Graybeard Wisdom
--- <end rant> ---
I'm working on self hosting Gitea right now. Hopefully it goes well!