Gitea: Open source, self-hosted GitHub alternative

Quick comparison from GitHub stats and READMEs:

Gogs: 24,564 stars, 602 issues, has a features list. https://github.com/gogits/gogs

Gitea: 5,971 stars, 733 issues, doesn't have a features list. https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea

Gogs features (from README):

    Activity timeline
    SSH and HTTP/HTTPS protocols
    SMTP/LDAP/Reverse proxy authentication
    Reverse proxy with sub-path
    Account/Organization/Repository management
    Add/Remove repository collaborators
    Repository/Organization webhooks (including Slack and Discord)
    Repository Git hooks/deploy keys
    Repository issues, pull requests, wiki and protected branches
    Migrate and mirror repository and its wiki
    Web editor for repository files and wiki
    Jupyter Notebook
    Two-factor authentication
    Gravatar and Federated avatar with custom source
    Mail service
    Administration panel
    Supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite3, MSSQL and TiDB (via MySQL protocol)
    Multi-language support (29 languages)

If anything, Gogs seems like a more polished product just by going through the README.

Gitea with all its 2+ maintainers can't take care of that?

It's hard to do a comparison without that list. Are users expected to install and find out?

Gitea is a fork of Gogs, so it has everything on that list and more. Sadly Gitea suffers from the usual problem that open source projects has, poor documentation. If you really want to compare feature lists, here's the one listed on their website (https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/).

Why compare two products by their README and not their website? Heck, why not compare them by using their test instances that are there for you to try.

Gitea does not have every feature that Gogs has.

Gitea has every feature that Gogs had at the point when they forked it, plus a few that they've ported over.

But there are still features that have been in Gogs for over a year now that Gitea does not have.

One example that burned me earlier this year, Gitea's backup/restore feature is still very underdeveloped. Gogs' backup/restore feature has been capable of backing up and switching databases for over a year, while Gitea still can only backup and restore to a database of the same type (e.g. Postgres to Postgres)

Is there any hopes of them un-forking? I haven't followed those communities, not sure where such discussions might be happening.

Also, thanks for noting this. I had the mental perception that Gogs had really been fully surpassed by Gitea, and I need to re-evaluate now. Thanks.

> Is there any hopes of them un-forking?

Doubtful. IIRC it was somewhat of a hostile & opportunistic fork. The Gogs maintainer went on vacation or something and didn't reply to issues for a couple weeks so someone forked to Gitea and declared themselves the new mainline only for the Gogs maintainer to return and not appreciate the attempted usurpation.

I think it was more than a couple of weeks. Also before the fork the maintainer was asked multiple times to allow other contributors to become co-maintainer to reduce the bus factor.

Sounds like Redmine / ChiliProject from a few years ago: https://www.chiliproject.org/projects/chiliproject/wiki/Why_... ChiliProject is dead now, but Redmine continues to live on.

> Also, thanks for noting this. I had the mental perception that Gogs had really been fully surpassed by Gitea, and I need to re-evaluate now.

You had that perception for good reason: it had surpassed GoGS. But they're both moderately active projects so it's good to revaluate regularly.

As far as I understand the reason for the fork was that Gogs has a single maintainer who want to keep control over the project (he created it, so he has that right).

Gitea on the other hand was to be more of a community project with multiple maintainers and ways for active contributors to become one.

Though Gogs has more stars, and currently, I think, more related project/integrations, looking at GH stats, Gitea has more activity, PR's, commits, etc.

That made me choose Gitea over Gogs. Really content with it.. was planning on using Gitlab at first, but it would require AWS instances with double the oomph.

The documentation could be better, agree, but a search in issues or filing a Help wanted issue comes a long way.

> Heck, why not compare them by using their test instances that are there for you to try.

Time?

I'd say if you don't have time to compare them, don't offer a comparison. It's not doing anyone any favors. In fact that only serves to waste more of your precious time.

Here is the development activity between the two projects:

https://public.gitsense.com/insight/github?r=gogits/gogs::go...

In the last 365 days, there were 54 unique contributors to Gogs

https://public.gitsense.com/insight/github?r=gogits/gogs::go...

and 136 unique contributors to Gitea

https://public.gitsense.com/insight/github?r=gogits/gogs::go...

> Are users expected to install and find out?

When I was looking into switching from Gogs to Gitea, that is exactly what they expected you to do. I recall there being an issue saying that they won't compare the two because it's hard to keep up-to-date.

Which is a stupid excuse, considering it's supposed to be a community-based fork instead of run by one person.

I remember this question via discuss, and I personally said that this list will be anyway always out of date.

If you want to compare Gogs and Gitea you have to compare the feature list.

Gitea is a fork of Gogs.

> Are users expected to install and find out?

Some due diligence and going to the gitea website could also do the trick. https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/

Which is literally the second sentence on the page linked to in this HN post.

Which obviously was not what I was asking.

I was mostly wondering why they don't have a list of features right there in their frontpage or inside the README on GitHub.

I'm wondering if Gitea is a little better than Gogs in term of security.

I remember that Debian considered Gogs to replace Alioth, but rejected it because of security concerns like injections (SQL XSS, etc).

I've also seen Gogs REST API behave badly when we tried to migrate/create a few hundred repositories using said API. Some of the repositories had special characters in their names, and the REST API accepted them without warnings. And after that the instance was pretty much unusable.

It was a while ago, but at the time, it seems that Gogs didn't do much input sanitization.

GOGS 的一些核心团队的动机令人担忧。

Except for the features list, how good really are stars and issue counts indicators for anything? Gogs has been around for longer and has received much more publicity, so it's bound to have more stars. Similarly, Gitea has more contributors whereas Gogs is mostly a one man job, so Gitea users might feel more likely to receive an answer than from Gogs. It really feels more like you're comparing the community there than the product.

That said, I agree that Gitea should publish a features list and list the differences between the versions.

Outside Jupyter Notebook Gitea supports all of these plus is managed by a community team not a singular maintainer with commit access (last I checked).

A good product is not defined by having a feature list.

Well, let's call it not "feature list" but "specified vision statement" and then it should have that. It should be quite clear from the main README and the main website what distinguishes this project from others. Otherwise it's quite likely that such specification doesn't exist and goals are unclear, which usually means bloated blobb of unfinished 10 million "features".

There is a milestone system setup on github which tracks when features will be introduced into master and such, so I wouldn't call it a lack of a vision statement.

I don't think a vision statement is necessary either since I'm a fan of developing software primarly for dogfooding, fixing problems you have is probably a good way to improve the software for others.

It isn't though. People will make stupid demands, not because they are stupid, but because they don't incorporate previous decisions taken and they don't incorporate how their desired solution affects other users of the whole system. Last but not least having a 1000 feature blobb doesn't help anybody.

That doesn't mean that the maintainers of a community fork will have to follow every demand of the userbase.

Differences issues: https://github.com/go-gitea/website/issues/40

Gitea is a disreputable and hostile fork of gogs. You should stick to gogs.

Care to elaborate?

Gogs author didn't want to incorporate proposed changes into Gogs, so a bunch of other developers forked Gogs and went on their own promoting Gitea as true open-source by spirit and blamed Gogs author for his inflexibility. I am using Gogs, becuase it has all I need (Gitea is too little added value for me)...

> Gogs author didn't want to incorporate proposed changes into Gogs, so a bunch of other developers forked Gogs

This sounds like a reasonable way for forking though. I mean what is open source for if you can't go and and implement your own features if you so desire. Sounds to me like both sides are at fault.

I don't know enough of the details to really tell you, but it was more hostile then just that. I heard the maintainer went on hiatus and that's when they forked it - like there was some drama going on, it wasn't just a "I'd like to incorporate my changes here" and more of a "HEY LOOK THE DEV LEFT, WE'RE THE NEW GOGS" kinda thing. Check out some of the other comments in this thread, they explain it better.

The problem was/is that on Gogs there is only one person with write access. When Unkwon goes AWOL or on vacation, it means nobody can fix urgend security fixes into master. In that case a community fork would be necessary everytime the main dev is not available but PRs require merging.

I would gladly switch back once Gogs is no longer vulnerable to the Bus-Problem.

That's just not true (or rather not the only reason). The Gogs maintainer went away for months with no sign of life. He also was the only one with write access to the gogs repository on GitHub which often resulted in no progress for months because of his disappearances.

An earlier comment I wrote on this subject:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13297748

The project had already forked in the past, but it eventually was deleted and was merged into the upstream because of one very simple reason: Unknwon, the creator of Gogs, came back. The fact that he left again is the main reason why the project forked again.

It's not like other people are mentioning in the thread that "some contributions would not get added" - but rather the fact that he often has really long periods of absence: just take a look at the contributions on his profile https://github.com/Unknwon

And of course, I'm not putting the blame on him - all of us need breaks from time to time - but during these periods where he can't work on the project, the project is essentially brought to a halt, seeing as there is no one else in the community of contributors who is able to merge pull requests - even if they are critical.

Gitea is however the more active (and quite active) side of the fork so I'd say it was quite successfully. You can easily check this in the contribution statistics on Github for both projects.

More active by commit active and releases.

I evaluated them both again a month ago and found that Gogs is as active or more active than Gitea by actual features developed, they just have less frequent releases.

> hostile fork

Frankly, I'd have expected better from the creator of sway. As someone who is not involved in either project, I see two active projects, which offers more choice to users, makes it less likely for both projects to go away, offer competition and all around be in the spirit of open-source.

Often I hear, "if you don't like it, fork it" and then when it gets forked, you get called hostile? Doesn't make sense to me from a rational perspective - nobody forces you to adopt Gitea or Gogs if you don't want to.