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!
I’d go for Forjego or Gitea.
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.
@idunnololz I’m running gitea and tailscale. Sadly I had not heard of Forgejo at the time or I might have went with it instead. (Might switch over if i get bored or an itch one afternoon). Works great for me though.
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.
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.
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.
Forgejo + Tailscale. Forgejo is the app behind Codeberg so it’s battle tested. I switched to it from Gitea after the controversy.
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 19 acronyms.
[Thread #157 for this comm, first seen 11th Mar 2026, 23:20] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Forgejo is the way
I second the option of Git + SSH. That will scale to one hundred repos. And if you don’t want the repos to be checked out, use “git clone -n” to not do that. It’ll just be dozens of repos which only have the minimal .git/ directory. All other repos that specify this one as the upstream will have no issues pulling or pushing code.
You won’t have PR features nor a web UI though.
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.
I’ve used Gitea before, Frogejo also looks pretty good
If you’re looking for a bare bones solution, and you already have a machine that you can SSH into, you could just use that. There are desktop GUI/TUI apps galore that you can use to inspect commits, branches and such.
At work I’m in the process of planning a move from Subversion to Git. So I’ve been looking at Forgejo, a hard fork of Gitea maintained by Codeberg. It has all the important features of other forges like GitLab and Gitea. But is completely open source.
if it wasn’t for the webui, a bare git repo would suffice. any repo can be a remote. it’s distributed, after all.
if you wanna be extra you can host git-pr
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?
I didn’t even know that’s a thing! Looks like it’s somewhat new. What a time to be alive!
just use a make file like a civilised human being
