What is Forgejo?
Forgejo is a software forge you host yourself. A forge is the place a development team's work lives: the git repositories, plus the issue tracker, pull requests and code review, CI/CD, package registries, project boards and wikis that sit around them.
It was forked from Gitea in 2022 and is governed by Codeberg e.V., a democratic non-profit, which is the arrangement that keeps it exclusively free software. Its CI, Forgejo Actions, is compatible with GitHub Actions workflows.
What "self-hosted forge" actually means
The forges most teams know are services: GitHub, GitLab.com, Bitbucket. You sign up, someone else runs it, and your repositories live on their infrastructure.
A self-hosted forge is the same set of capabilities as software you install. Your repositories are on a server you chose, reachable on terms you set. Nobody else's outage is your outage, nobody else's pricing change is your budget problem, and nobody else's terms of service govern your source code.
That is the whole trade, and both halves are real: you gain control and you take on operation.
Why it was forked from Gitea
Gitea is also open source and also a forge. In 2022 its trademark and governance moved to a for-profit company, and part of the community forked the project in response, placing it under a non-profit with member governance instead.
The code lineage is shared. The difference is who decides, and what can change later. That distinction matters more to some organizations than others, and it is worth knowing it exists before choosing, because switching forge later is a bigger job than choosing correctly now.
Forgejo compared with the alternatives
Against GitHub. GitHub is a service with an enormous ecosystem and network effects that a self-hosted forge does not have. If open-source drive-by contributions matter to you, that is a genuine argument for staying. If what matters is where the code sits and who can reach it, that argument does not apply.
Against GitLab. GitLab self-managed covers more ground: portfolio management, extensive security scanning, compliance tooling. It is also substantially heavier to run. Forgejo is a smaller thing that does the core well, and for a team that wants git, issues, review and CI without a platform project, smaller is the feature.
Against Gitea. Very similar software, different governance. Choose on that basis rather than on a feature table.
When it fits
- Code that should not leave your jurisdiction, whether by regulation or by preference.
- A team that wants the core and not the platform. Forgejo runs comfortably on modest hardware, which is not true of every alternative.
- Predictable cost. Self-hosting is priced by infrastructure rather than per seat, so growing the team does not re-price the tool.
- Leaving a service whose terms changed. This is the most common actual trigger, and it is worth being honest that it is usually a push rather than a pull.
When it does not
A small team with no jurisdiction requirement is usually better on a hosted service, and which one matters less than the decision: GitHub, GitLab.com, Codeberg, or a managed Forgejo such as Codey are all reasonable answers. The operational work below is real, and a two-person team's time is better spent elsewhere than on any of it.
If you depend on the GitHub ecosystem. Some integrations, marketplace actions and community expectations are specific to GitHub. Check the ones you actually use before assuming they port.
If nobody will run it. See the next section, which is the one that decides this.
What self-hosting involves
- Updates, including the security ones. A forge is on the internet and holds your source code. Falling behind on releases is the risk it sounds like.
- Backups covering more than the repositories. Repositories are the easy part, and often the only part people back up. Issues, pull requests, review history, wiki and CI configuration live in the database, and losing those loses the team's memory of why the code is the way it is.
- CI runners. Actions need somewhere to execute, with their own capacity, isolation and cost.
- Storage growth. Repositories, artifacts, packages and CI logs grow steadily and unevenly.
- Availability. When the forge is down, nobody merges and no pipeline runs.
None of this is difficult. All of it is continuous, which is a different property, and it is why "we will self-host it" and "we are self-hosting it" describe different levels of commitment.
Where VSHN fits
VSHN migrates teams to Forgejo from GitHub, GitLab or Gitea, and operates it on Swiss infrastructure. If you would rather not think about the operational list at all, Codey.ch is managed Forgejo starting at CHF 39 per month. Moving specifically from Gitea has its own migration guide, and the sovereignty assessment covers the jurisdiction question.
If you are still deciding whether to leave a hosted service at all, the honest first question is what is actually pushing you, because the answer usually determines whether self-hosting solves it.