Gogs and Gitea are Open Source, single-binary Go implementations of a Github-like git repository hosting system which I can use privately or in teams. Both are light on system requirements, contrary to a pretty large and quite popular Open Source Java implementation of a similar utility.
Gitea is a fork of Gogs, and it’s very difficult to say which is better: Gogs is, at times, a bit more Github-lookalike I’d say, whereas Gitea’s look is a bit fresher and feels “younger”. Gitea brings everything in a single binary whereas Gogs has a number of support files (CSS, JavaScript, templates) it requires. (This is advantageous because I can change or replace templates if desired. Fabian reminds me that it’s possible to customize Gitea as well.) Both projects appear to be alive and kicking in spite of rumors that Gogs had been abandoned.
Installation basically consists of ensuring the appropriate binary is launched. I then launch a Web browser and point it at the port number indicated on the console (http://0.0.0.0:3000 by default) and answer a few questions. The responses are written into an INI-type configuration file (app.ini) which can be pre-populated of course and looks like this:
[database]
DB_TYPE = sqlite3
HOST = 127.0.0.1:3306
NAME = gogs
USER = root
PASSWD =
SSL_MODE = disable
PATH = data/gogs.db
[repository]
ROOT = data/repos
[server]
DOMAIN = localhost
HTTP_PORT = 4000
ROOT_URL = http://localhost:4000/
DISABLE_SSH = false
SSH_PORT = 4022
START_SSH_SERVER = false
OFFLINE_MODE = true
...A cursory search will also provide plenty of resources for installing either with, say, Ansible, if that’s your preferred method. Alternatively, both programs support installation with docker.
Both programs support different backend databases (SQLite3, PostgreSQL, MySQL) and SMTP, PAM, or LDAP authentication. They offer git over HTTP and have an optional embedded SSH server for git over SSH. (Just like in Github or Gitlab, I upload one or more SSH keys which Gogs/Gitea use for authentication.) While there exists a list of Gitea features and Gogs features these lists are difficult to compare.
Both programs have a CLI albeit with slightly differing commands. The CLI is used for backups, user creation, and other administrative commands.
$ gogs admin create-user --name jane --password sekrit --email jane@example.com
New user 'jane' has been successfully created!I initially chose to use Gitea but thought I’d ask yesterday in a poll: 50/50 is about the reponse I get. A friendly user wrote privately and said:
I’ve been running Gogs for ~20 active users on a low-end VPS alongside other services for a year now. The cli is quite simple and works well, especially backups. Manual upgrades via git went well too 6 month ago.
Both utilities have a dump respectively backup CLI command to create a backup of their data in a ZIP file.
I find Gogs documentation more comprehensive (and Gitea’s sometimes links to it). Featurewise, both are more or less on par, at least in terms of visible features. Both are Open Source, and both projects have over 500 open issues in their trackers and several dozen open pull requests.
Gogs and Gitea can import projects, so I used one of my Github-hosted repositories as a source to produce the following screen shots.
gogs
gitea
A bit of both
Both programs display commits like Github does and have a unified diff and a split (side-by-side) diff view. In Gitea the knobs are located as I know them from Github, but that doesn’t mean Gogs’ knob placement isn’t better. Interestingly, repository settings and other pages in Gogs are styled more similarly to Github than in Gitea. So again, six of one and half a dozen of the other. Both allow import of existing repositories (as I did above), though just the repository is imported: neither the issues nor the pull requests, at least not from Github.
Both have an issue tracker with github-flavored Markdown support, file attachments, etc. There are slight cosmetic differences but nothing drastic that I can see. Both support Git hooks, Webhooks and deployment keys (and I do prefer the page layout that Gogs offers in the “sub pages” such as settings).
I’ve chosen to use Gitea, but as I’ve said: it’s a hard toss.