Choosing a Self-Hosted Git Service - paritybit.ca

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2021-05-22 19:00:06

Git is by far the most popular version control system right now and there are so many options for self-hosting your repositories it can be difficult to figure out which one is the best for you. In this post, I’ll go through many of the more popular free and open source options with a brief opinion about each and links to where you can find out more. I’ll also explain what I chose for myself and why.

GitLab is one of the most popular git hosting services next to GitHub. They operate with an open-core business model which means that core features of GitLab are open source, but many other features are proprietary software.

GitLab’s UI is somewhat similar to GitHub’s and it uses the same Pull Request model for contributing to others’ software projects where you “fork” a project and then submit a pull request using the web UI.

I will get straight to the point with this though. Don’t use GitLab. It’s a bloated mess of a software forge that, yes, has a lot of features, but also has a lot of problems. For example, GitLab has memory leaks which, instead of fixing, they created a duct-tape solution which kills a memory-hungry process and re-starts it. They also recommend 8GB of RAM as a minimum for the application to run smoothly. EIGHT GIGABYTES! I’m running Gitea on a PineA64 SBC and the entire system’s RAM usage is at less than 0.5GB. GitLab is slow, bloated, and definitely not a good candidate for someone looking to self-host a git service.