+++
title = "Hello Gitea"
date = "2025-03-12"
author = "John Costa"
toc = true
tags = ["Software", "homelab"]
+++

# TLDR
> I use my own Gitea instance now! [git.johncosta.tech](https://git.johncosta.tech)

Three days after I moved into my apartment, I bought a server. A small, fairly low power Fujitsu desktop, from facebook marketplace. Since then I've been really into self-hosting, so far I have.

- [Immich](https://immich.app)
- [Jellyfin](https://jellyfin.org)
- [Pi-hole](https://pi-hole.net)
- [Planka](https://planka.app)
- [Grafana](https://grafana.com)

And a couple of others.

Point being, I've really enjoyed the journey of managing and using all these services. In the future I'll write more in detail about my setup.

# Gitea

I came across [Gitea](https://about.gitea.com), and prompt closed it - surely GitHub is unbeatable, right? But it kept bugging me, but at the same time I thought.

- It's probably too hard to manage.
- SSH would be too weird.
- GitHub is just better.

I was wrong on all fronts.

In fact, this might be the service I most enjoy using (although they are all pretty great). Having ownership over my code has felt good, and the WebUI is snappy and a pleasure to use, and because it's self-hosted it's super quick (I only have to go through LAN most of the time).

## But GitHub?

### Open Source

I still believe GitHub is the best for open-source projects - it's just more popular - and therefore much easier to people to contribute. But for private code? Or personal projects you don't expect to have contributors to? Why not try another service?

### The AI problem

GitHub was (and for the most part still is) an incredible service, but now it's using it's massive amounts of code to train AI, whether you want to or not. It's perhaps not worth it to trade privacy for convinience anymore.

I also do not trust a huge company (Microsoft), to not use my private repo's to train AI.

# Conclusion

So far, I love Gitea. It's super fast, incredibly easy to setup and manage, and it's completely open source. And from now on, my personal projects and private projects will be self hosted. Check out [git.johncosta.tech](https://git.johncosta.tech) to view my public repo's on there.
