Gitea

Gitea is a lightweight, self-hosted Git service written in Go, originally forked from Gogs in 2016. The project has grown into one of the most popular open-source alternatives to GitHub and GitLab, distinguished by its remarkably low resource requirements and ease of deployment. While Gitea is a community-driven open-source project without a single headquarters, the commercial entity Gitea Ltd is registered in the EU, and the project has strong ties to the European developer community. Gitea's philosophy is simple: provide a painless, self-hosted all-in-one software development platform that anyone can run, even on a Raspberry Pi.

Gitea fills an important niche in the self-hosted Git ecosystem. GitLab, while powerful, is notoriously resource-hungry, requiring several gigabytes of RAM just to run. Gitea, by contrast, can run comfortably on a system with as little as 256MB of RAM, making it ideal for small teams, homelab environments, educational institutions, and organizations that want version control without dedicating significant infrastructure. Despite this lightweight footprint, Gitea provides a comprehensive feature set that covers the needs of most development teams.

Core Git Hosting Features

Gitea provides full Git repository hosting with a clean, intuitive web interface inspired by GitHub's design language. Repositories support all standard Git operations over HTTPS and SSH, with fine-grained access control through repository-level, organization-level, and team-based permissions. The interface includes repository browsing with syntax highlighting for hundreds of programming languages, file editing directly in the browser, and commit history visualization. Repository mirroring, both push and pull, allows Gitea to synchronize with external Git servers, making it useful as a backup or local mirror for remote repositories.

Branch protection rules prevent accidental force pushes and enforce review requirements before merging. Protected branches can require a minimum number of approvals, passing CI checks, and linear commit history. These protections are essential for teams maintaining production code and are comparable to the branch protection features offered by GitHub and GitLab.

Issue Tracking and Project Management

Gitea includes a built-in issue tracker with support for labels, milestones, assignees, and project boards. Issues support Markdown formatting, file attachments, reactions, and cross-references between issues and pull requests. The project board feature provides Kanban-style workflow visualization, allowing teams to track work items across customizable columns. While not as feature-rich as dedicated project management tools like Jira or Linear, Gitea's integrated issue tracking is sufficient for many development teams and eliminates the need for a separate tool.

The pull request workflow supports traditional merge commits, squash merging, and rebase merging, with an inline code review system that allows reviewers to comment on specific lines of code. Pull request templates, auto-merging when checks pass, and review request features round out a collaboration workflow that is familiar to anyone who has used GitHub or GitLab.

Gitea Actions: Built-in CI/CD

One of Gitea's most significant recent additions is Gitea Actions, a CI/CD system that is compatible with GitHub Actions workflow syntax. This means that many existing GitHub Actions workflows can run on Gitea with minimal or no modification. Gitea Actions supports workflow triggers based on pushes, pull requests, tags, schedules, and manual dispatch. The act runner, which executes workflow jobs, can be self-hosted alongside Gitea or on separate infrastructure.

The GitHub Actions compatibility is a strategic advantage, as it allows teams migrating from GitHub to bring their CI/CD workflows with them. While not every GitHub Actions feature and marketplace action is supported, the core workflow syntax, job definitions, step definitions, and environment management are compatible. This significantly lowers the barrier to migration for teams that have invested in GitHub Actions-based automation.

Package Registry

Gitea includes a built-in package registry that supports multiple package formats including npm, PyPI, Maven, NuGet, Cargo, Helm, Docker/OCI containers, and more. This allows development teams to host their private packages alongside their source code without needing a separate package management service like GitHub Packages, Artifactory, or Nexus. The package registry integrates with Gitea Actions, enabling automated package publishing as part of CI/CD workflows.

Lightweight Architecture and Performance

Gitea's Go-based architecture compiles to a single binary with no external dependencies, making deployment remarkably simple. A working Gitea instance requires only the binary itself and a database (SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or MSSQL). The entire application, including the web interface, API server, and background workers, runs in a single process. This simplicity translates to exceptional performance and reliability, as there are fewer components that can fail or require maintenance.

In benchmark comparisons, Gitea consistently outperforms GitLab in terms of resource usage and response times, particularly for smaller installations. Repositories clone quickly over both SSH and HTTPS, the web interface is responsive even on modest hardware, and the application startup time is measured in seconds rather than minutes. For organizations running development infrastructure on limited budgets, this efficiency is a significant practical advantage.

Deployment Options

Gitea can be deployed in multiple ways: as a standalone binary, via Docker, through Kubernetes with official Helm charts, or from distribution packages. The Docker deployment is particularly popular, with the official image being one of the most downloaded on Docker Hub. A complete Gitea setup with Docker Compose, including the application and a PostgreSQL database, can be configured in a few lines and launched in under a minute.

For organizations with strict data sovereignty requirements, Gitea's self-hosting model ensures complete control over where code and development data reside. By deploying on European infrastructure from providers like Hetzner, OVHcloud, or Scaleway, organizations can guarantee that their source code, issues, CI/CD logs, and package artifacts never leave EU jurisdiction.

API and Integration

Gitea provides a comprehensive REST API that covers repositories, issues, pull requests, users, organizations, and administrative functions. The API is compatible with a subset of the GitHub API, which means that many tools and scripts written for GitHub can work with Gitea with minimal modifications. Swagger documentation is available directly from the Gitea instance, making API exploration and testing straightforward.

Webhook support enables integration with external services including CI/CD systems, chat platforms like Slack and Mattermost, and custom automation. OAuth2 authentication is supported for API access, and the platform can act as an OAuth2 provider for SSO integration with other applications.

Migration from GitHub and GitLab

Gitea includes built-in migration tools that can import repositories, issues, pull requests, milestones, labels, releases, and wiki content from GitHub, GitLab, Gogs, Bitbucket, and other platforms. This automated migration significantly reduces the effort required to switch from a centralized platform to a self-hosted Gitea instance. The GitHub Actions compatibility for CI/CD further simplifies the transition for teams moving away from GitHub.

Community and Ecosystem

Gitea has a vibrant open-source community with regular releases and active development. The project is licensed under the MIT license, one of the most permissive open-source licenses available, which allows unrestricted use including in commercial settings. The project has garnered over 45,000 stars on GitHub and maintains an active community forum and chat channels. Third-party plugins and integrations extend Gitea's capabilities in areas like code quality analysis, advanced authentication, and monitoring.

Gitea vs. Forgejo

In 2022, a fork of Gitea called Forgejo was created by community members concerned about the governance direction of the Gitea project after the formation of a commercial entity. Forgejo aims to be a community-owned, fully open-source alternative that stays true to the original community-driven development model. Both projects remain technically very similar, with Forgejo tracking Gitea's releases and adding community-driven improvements. For organizations choosing between the two, the decision often comes down to governance philosophy rather than technical differences.

Pricing

Gitea is completely free and open source under the MIT license. There are no paid tiers, no enterprise editions, and no artificial feature limitations. The only costs are the infrastructure to host it, which can be as minimal as a small VPS or a Raspberry Pi. This makes Gitea one of the most cost-effective development platform options available, particularly for small teams and organizations that already have infrastructure they can use.