I’ve started building a small decentralized, non commercial app with a Rust backend + Node.js frontend running on k8s. I would have my own dedicated server for this. Just mentioning the setup because it might grow and for git there seem to be only GitHub and GitLab around and I prefer GitLab.
I care a lot about security and was wondering if it makes sense to self-host GitLab. I‘m not afraid of doing it, but after setup it shouldn’t take more than 1-2 hours per week for me to maintain it in the long run and I’m wondering if that’s realistic.
Would love to hear about the experience of people who did what I’m planning to do.
EDIT: Thanks for all the answers, trying my best to reply. I want CI/CD, container registry and secrets management that’s what I was hoping to get out of GitLab.
First question is why do you want a forge ? Knowing the feature you need out of it is what should drive your decision.
Personally I would question the benefit of allocating ~5% of your work time to anything that isn’t core building your product but that’s up to you.
Yea a surprisingly small number of people don’t know a git remote can literally be any folder outside of your tree, over almost any kind of connection.
I thought about doing a forge but realized that if I was the only one working on this stuff then I could do the same thing by setting my remote to a folder on my NAS.
Yup, for a solo project that you don’t want to share I would even argue that a forge is close to pointless.
Any ssh remote will work as a backup, you can run the ci/cd task on your own computer just fine (very likely faster even), you obviously don’t need to send PR and request code review to yourself and if a TODO.md isn’t enough to keep track of tasks there’s a billions lightweight task/note tracker.
I use github because I’m a lazy and it works fine as a backup but I don’t need 99% of the features for my pet projects.
I would deploy the whole app over k8s Helm charts and I would want to use the CI/CD tools and also do Traefik/Ingress for load balancing and having cloudflare point at it. In the future I might be collaborating with other people so I would want the architecture to be solid.