I’ve decided that I’m moving my projects off of Github. Why you may ask? The primary reason is Microsoft, which owns Github. Ironic because I work in Azure but outside of work I’m definitely not a fan.
The build up#
While my degree literally is in data and AI, I’ve started to kind of hate AI. This is mainly because big tech thinks everything needs AI. I’m sure you’ve heard about Microsoft making Windows 11 an agentic OS, whatever that even means.
And of course these AI models need training data, and a lot of that. Being a free user of Github, you start to wonder, they probably just yank everything you put on their platform into their training data. Not that an AI would get a lot smarter by using my code but still, I don’t like it.
The solution#
About a month or so ago, I stumbled upon Codeberg. Codeberg is a democratic community-driven, non-profit software development platform based on Forgejo. Forgejo is self-hostable free platform for software development, built on top of Git. Think of it like a self-hosted Github.
Why did I choose for Codeberg? These few lines of the Codeberg documentation will make it clear:
The mission of Codeberg e.V. is to build and maintain a free collaboration platform for creating, archiving, and preserving code and to document its development process.
Dependencies on commercial, external, or proprietary services for the operation of the platform are avoided, in order to guarantee independence and reliability.
The only drawback#
As I love DevOps, I’ve lost something important in my repo’s: Github Actions. Codeberg CI is not that mature since you have to sign up to use the Woodpecker CI. What is an option is to self host action runners. You have 2 options here:
- a custom Woodpecker instance
- Forgejo Actions (which is really similar go Github Actions)
This is definitely something that I’m going to look into once I setup my homelab from scratch again (yes, I broke some things).
What’s next#
First of all I’m just trying to make sure nothing broke during the migration. After that I will look into the self hosted CI, but that will still take a while I guess.
Sometime I will probably start to self-host my own Git server, but for now I’m sticking with Codeberg.
