Self-Host Gitea: Lightweight GitHub Alternative 2026

TL;DR

Gitea (MIT, ~43K GitHub stars, Go) is a lightweight self-hosted Git service — the most popular GitHub alternative for self-hosters. Runs in a single Go binary or Docker container under 100MB RAM. Full Git hosting: repos, branches, pull requests, issues, wikis, releases, webhooks, CI/CD via Gitea Actions (GitHub Actions-compatible YAML), and organizations. GitHub charges $4/user/month for Teams. Gitea is free on your own hardware.

Key Takeaways

• Gitea: MIT, ~43K stars, Go — full GitHub alternative in <100MB RAM
• Gitea Actions: GitHub Actions-compatible YAML — reuse your existing workflows
• SSH + HTTP: Standard Git push/pull over both SSH and HTTPS
• Migration: Import repos from GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket with one click
• Packages: Container registry, npm, PyPI, Maven registries built-in
• Federation: Gitea supports basic ActivityPub federation (experimental)

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Gitea vs Forgejo vs GitLab CE

Feature	Gitea	Forgejo	GitLab CE
License	MIT	GPL 3.0	MIT (CE)
GitHub Stars	~43K	~11K	~23K
RAM usage	~100MB	~100MB	~4GB+
CI/CD	Gitea Actions	Forgejo Actions	GitLab CI
Actions compatibility	GitHub Actions YAML	GitHub Actions YAML	Custom format
Container registry	Yes	Yes	Yes
Package registries	Yes (npm/PyPI/Maven/etc.)	Yes	Yes
Federation	Experimental	Yes (ActivityPub)	No
Setup complexity	Low	Low	High

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Part 1: Docker Setup

# docker-compose.yml
services:
  gitea:
    image: gitea/gitea:latest
    container_name: gitea
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
      - "2222:22"        # SSH — map host port 2222 to Gitea SSH
    volumes:
      - gitea_data:/data
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    environment:
      USER_UID: 1000
      USER_GID: 1000
      GITEA__database__DB_TYPE: postgres
      GITEA__database__HOST: postgres:5432
      GITEA__database__NAME: gitea
      GITEA__database__USER: gitea
      GITEA__database__PASSWD: "${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}"
      GITEA__server__DOMAIN: "git.yourdomain.com"
      GITEA__server__ROOT_URL: "https://git.yourdomain.com"
      GITEA__server__SSH_DOMAIN: "git.yourdomain.com"
      GITEA__server__SSH_PORT: 2222
      GITEA__server__HTTP_PORT: 3000
      GITEA__service__DISABLE_REGISTRATION: "true"   # Disable after setup
      GITEA__service__REQUIRE_SIGNIN_VIEW: "false"
    depends_on:
      postgres:
        condition: service_healthy

  postgres:
    image: postgres:16-alpine
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      POSTGRES_USER: gitea
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: "${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}"
      POSTGRES_DB: gitea
    volumes:
      - postgres_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD-SHELL", "pg_isready -U gitea"]
      interval: 10s
      start_period: 20s

volumes:
  gitea_data:
  postgres_data:

# .env
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=your-secure-db-password

docker compose up -d

Visit http://your-server:3000 → complete the installation wizard.

---

Part 2: HTTPS with Caddy

git.yourdomain.com {
    reverse_proxy localhost:3000
}

SSH access

Users push over SSH using port 2222 (or any port you mapped):

# Clone via SSH:
git clone ssh://git@git.yourdomain.com:2222/username/repo.git

# Or add to ~/.ssh/config for convenience:
# Host git.yourdomain.com
#   Port 2222

---

Part 3: First-Time Setup

1. Visit https://git.yourdomain.com
2. Complete the installation wizard (DB settings are pre-populated from env vars)
3. Create the admin account
4. After setup, disable registration:

environment:
  GITEA__service__DISABLE_REGISTRATION: "true"
  GITEA__service__ALLOW_ONLY_EXTERNAL_SELF_REGISTRATION: "false"

Or via app.ini:

[service]
DISABLE_REGISTRATION = true

---

Part 4: SSH Key Setup

# Generate SSH key (if you don't have one):
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "your@email.com"

# Copy public key:
cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

# In Gitea: User Settings → SSH / GPG Keys → Add Key
# Paste public key content

# Test connection:
ssh -T git@git.yourdomain.com -p 2222
# Returns: Hi username! You've successfully authenticated.

# Clone:
git clone ssh://git@git.yourdomain.com:2222/myorg/myrepo.git

# Or set remote:
git remote add origin ssh://git@git.yourdomain.com:2222/myorg/myrepo.git

---

Part 5: Gitea Actions (CI/CD)

Gitea Actions uses GitHub Actions-compatible YAML. Enable it:

environment:
  GITEA__actions__ENABLED: "true"

Run an Act Runner

# Add to docker-compose.yml:
services:
  gitea-runner:
    image: gitea/act_runner:latest
    container_name: gitea_runner
    restart: unless-stopped
    volumes:
      - ./runner-config.yaml:/config.yaml
      - gitea_runner_data:/data
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
    environment:
      CONFIG_FILE: /config.yaml
      GITEA_INSTANCE_URL: "https://git.yourdomain.com"
      GITEA_RUNNER_REGISTRATION_TOKEN: "${RUNNER_TOKEN}"
      GITEA_RUNNER_NAME: "docker-runner"
      GITEA_RUNNER_LABELS: "ubuntu-latest:docker://node:20-bullseye"

# Get runner token from Gitea:
# Site Administration → Runners → Create new runner → copy token

# Register:
docker exec gitea_runner gitea-act-runner register \
  --instance https://git.yourdomain.com \
  --token YOUR_RUNNER_TOKEN \
  --name docker-runner \
  --labels ubuntu-latest:docker://node:20-bullseye

Example GitHub Actions-compatible workflow

# .gitea/workflows/ci.yml
name: CI

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
  pull_request:
    branches: [main]

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: '20'
      - run: npm ci
      - run: npm test
      - run: npm run build

  docker:
    needs: test
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Build and push Docker image
        run: |
          docker build -t git.yourdomain.com/${{ gitea.repository }}:${{ gitea.sha }} .
          docker push git.yourdomain.com/${{ gitea.repository }}:${{ gitea.sha }}

---

Part 6: Container Registry

Gitea includes a container registry at git.yourdomain.com:

# Login:
docker login git.yourdomain.com -u username -p your-password

# Push:
docker tag myimage:latest git.yourdomain.com/username/myrepo:latest
docker push git.yourdomain.com/username/myrepo:latest

# Pull:
docker pull git.yourdomain.com/username/myrepo:latest

---

Part 7: Migrate from GitHub

Single repository

# Gitea UI: + → New Migration → GitHub
# Enter: GitHub repo URL + access token (for private repos)
# Gitea mirrors: issues, PRs, releases, labels, milestones

Bulk migration script

#!/bin/bash
# Migrate all repos from a GitHub org to Gitea

GITHUB_TOKEN="ghp_yourtoken"
GITHUB_ORG="your-github-org"
GITEA_URL="https://git.yourdomain.com"
GITEA_TOKEN="your-gitea-token"
GITEA_ORG="your-gitea-org"

# List all repos:
REPOS=$(curl -s -H "Authorization: token $GITHUB_TOKEN" \
  "https://api.github.com/orgs/${GITHUB_ORG}/repos?per_page=100" \
  | jq -r '.[].full_name')

for REPO in $REPOS; do
  echo "Migrating $REPO..."
  curl -s -X POST "${GITEA_URL}/api/v1/repos/migrate" \
    -H "Authorization: token ${GITEA_TOKEN}" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d "{
      \"clone_addr\": \"https://github.com/${REPO}\",
      \"auth_token\": \"${GITHUB_TOKEN}\",
      \"uid\": 1,
      \"repo_name\": \"$(echo $REPO | cut -d'/' -f2)\",
      \"mirror\": false,
      \"issues\": true,
      \"pull_requests\": true,
      \"releases\": true,
      \"labels\": true,
      \"milestones\": true
    }"
done

---

Part 8: Organization and Team Access

Organization: mycompany
├── Team: Owners (full access)
│   └── Users: alice, bob
├── Team: Developers (write access)
│   ├── Users: charlie, diana
│   └── Repos: backend, frontend, infra
└── Team: Contractors (read access)
    ├── Users: external1
    └── Repos: frontend (read only)

Create via API:

# Create org:
curl -X POST "${GITEA_URL}/api/v1/orgs" \
  -H "Authorization: token ${TOKEN}" \
  -d '{"username": "mycompany", "visibility": "private"}'

# Create team:
curl -X POST "${GITEA_URL}/api/v1/orgs/mycompany/teams" \
  -H "Authorization: token ${TOKEN}" \
  -d '{"name": "Developers", "permission": "write", "units": ["repo.code", "repo.issues"]}'

---

Maintenance

# Update Gitea:
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

# Backup:
# Stop Gitea first for consistent backup:
docker compose stop gitea
tar -czf gitea-backup-$(date +%Y%m%d).tar.gz \
  $(docker volume inspect gitea_gitea_data --format '{{.Mountpoint}}')
docker exec gitea-postgres-1 pg_dump -U gitea gitea \
  | gzip > gitea-db-$(date +%Y%m%d).sql.gz
docker compose start gitea

# Logs:
docker compose logs -f gitea

# Admin CLI:
docker exec -u git gitea gitea admin user create \
  --username alice --email alice@company.com --password secret --admin

# Gitea version:
docker exec gitea gitea --version

Why Self-Host Gitea?

The case for self-hosting Gitea comes down to three practical factors: data ownership, cost at scale, and operational control.

Data ownership is the fundamental argument. When you use a SaaS version of any tool, your data lives on someone else's infrastructure subject to their terms of service, their security practices, and their business continuity. If the vendor raises prices, gets acquired, changes API limits, or shuts down, you're left scrambling. Self-hosting Gitea means your data and configuration stay on infrastructure you control — whether that's a VPS, a bare metal server, or a home lab.

Cost at scale matters once you move beyond individual use. Most SaaS equivalents charge per user or per data volume. A self-hosted instance on a $10-20/month VPS typically costs less than per-user SaaS pricing for teams of five or more — and the cost doesn't scale linearly with usage. One well-configured server handles dozens of users for a flat monthly fee.

Operational control is the third factor. The Docker Compose configuration above exposes every setting that commercial equivalents often hide behind enterprise plans: custom networking, environment variables, storage backends, and authentication integrations. You decide when to update, how to configure backups, and what access controls to apply.

The honest tradeoff: you're responsible for updates, backups, and availability. For teams running any production workloads, this is familiar territory. For individuals, the learning curve is real but the tooling (Docker, Caddy, automated backups) is well-documented and widely supported.

Server Requirements and Sizing

Before deploying Gitea, assess your server capacity against expected workload.

Minimum viable setup: A 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM VPS with 20GB SSD is sufficient for personal use or small teams. Most consumer VPS providers — Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr — offer machines in this range for $5-10/month. Hetzner offers excellent price-to-performance for European and US regions.

Recommended production setup: 2 vCPUs with 4GB RAM and 40GB SSD handles most medium deployments without resource contention. This gives Gitea headroom for background tasks, caching, and concurrent users while leaving capacity for other services on the same host.

Storage planning: The Docker volumes in this docker-compose.yml store all persistent Gitea data. Estimate your storage growth rate early — for data-intensive tools, budget for 3-5x your initial estimate. Hetzner Cloud and Vultr both support online volume resizing without stopping your instance.

Operating system: Any modern 64-bit Linux distribution works. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Debian 12 are the most commonly tested configurations. Ensure Docker Engine 24.0+ and Docker Compose v2 are installed — verify with docker --version and docker compose version. Avoid Docker Desktop on production Linux servers; it adds virtualization overhead and behaves differently from Docker Engine in ways that cause subtle networking issues.

Network: Only ports 80 and 443 need to be publicly accessible when running behind a reverse proxy. Internal service ports should be bound to localhost only. A minimal UFW firewall that blocks all inbound traffic except SSH, HTTP, and HTTPS is the single most effective security measure for a self-hosted server.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Running Gitea without a tested backup strategy is an unacceptable availability risk. Docker volumes are not automatically backed up — if you delete a volume or the host fails, data is gone with no recovery path.

What to back up: The named Docker volumes containing Gitea's data (database files, user uploads, application state), your docker-compose.yml and any customized configuration files, and .env files containing secrets.

Backup approach: For simple setups, stop the container, archive the volume contents, then restart. For production environments where stopping causes disruption, use filesystem snapshots or database dump commands (PostgreSQL pg_dump, SQLite .backup, MySQL mysqldump) that produce consistent backups without downtime.

For a complete automated backup workflow that ships snapshots to S3-compatible object storage, see the Restic + Rclone backup guide. Restic handles deduplication and encryption; Rclone handles multi-destination uploads. The same setup works for any Docker volume.

Backup cadence: Daily backups to remote storage are a reasonable baseline for actively used tools. Use a 30-day retention window minimum — long enough to recover from mistakes discovered weeks later. For critical data, extend to 90 days and use a secondary destination.

Restore testing: A backup that has never been restored is a backup you cannot trust. Once a month, restore your Gitea backup to a separate Docker Compose stack on different ports and verify the data is intact. This catches silent backup failures, script errors, and volume permission issues before they matter in a real recovery.

Security Hardening

Self-hosting means you are responsible for Gitea's security posture. The Docker Compose setup provides a functional base; production deployments need additional hardening.

Always use a reverse proxy: Never expose Gitea's internal port directly to the internet. The docker-compose.yml binds to localhost; Caddy or Nginx provides HTTPS termination. Direct HTTP access transmits credentials in plaintext. A reverse proxy also centralizes TLS management, rate limiting, and access logging.

Strong credentials: Change default passwords immediately after first login. For secrets in docker-compose environment variables, generate random values with openssl rand -base64 32 rather than reusing existing passwords.

Firewall configuration:

ufw default deny incoming
ufw allow 22/tcp
ufw allow 80/tcp
ufw allow 443/tcp
ufw enable

Internal service ports (databases, admin panels, internal APIs) should only be reachable from localhost or the Docker network, never directly from the internet.

Network isolation: Docker Compose named networks keep Gitea's services isolated from other containers on the same host. Database containers should not share networks with containers that don't need direct database access.

VPN access for sensitive services: For internal-only tools, restricting access to a VPN adds a strong second layer. Headscale is an open source Tailscale control server that puts your self-hosted stack behind a WireGuard mesh, eliminating public internet exposure for internal tools.

Update discipline: Subscribe to Gitea's GitHub releases page to receive security advisory notifications. Schedule a monthly maintenance window to pull updated images. Running outdated container images is the most common cause of self-hosted service compromises.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

Container exits immediately or won't start

Check logs first — they almost always explain the failure:

docker compose logs -f gitea

Common causes: a missing required environment variable, a port already in use, or a volume permission error. Port conflicts appear as bind: address already in use. Find the conflicting process with ss -tlpn | grep PORT and either stop it or change Gitea's port mapping in docker-compose.yml.

Cannot reach the web interface

Work through this checklist:

1. Confirm the container is running: docker compose ps
2. Test locally on the server: curl -I http://localhost:PORT
3. If local access works but external doesn't, check your firewall: ufw status
4. If using a reverse proxy, verify it's running and the config is valid: caddy validate --config /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

Permission errors on volume mounts

Some containers run as a non-root user. If the Docker volume is owned by root, the container process cannot write to it. Find the volume's host path with docker volume inspect VOLUME_NAME, check the tool's documentation for its expected UID, and apply correct ownership:

chown -R 1000:1000 /var/lib/docker/volumes/your_volume/_data

High resource usage over time

Memory or CPU growing continuously usually indicates unconfigured log rotation, an unbound cache, or accumulated data needing pruning. Check current usage with docker stats gitea. Add resource limits in docker-compose.yml to prevent one container from starving others. For ongoing visibility into resource trends, deploy Prometheus + Grafana or Netdata.

Data disappears after container restart

Data stored in the container's writable layer — rather than a named volume — is lost when the container is removed or recreated. This happens when the volume mount path in docker-compose.yml doesn't match where the application writes data. Verify mount paths against the tool's documentation and correct the mapping. Named volumes persist across container removal; only docker compose down -v deletes them.

Keeping Gitea Updated

Gitea follows a regular release cadence. Staying current matters for security patches and compatibility. The update process with Docker Compose is straightforward:

docker compose pull          # Download updated images
docker compose up -d         # Restart with new images
docker image prune -f        # Remove old image layers (optional)

Read the changelog before major version updates. Some releases include database migrations or breaking configuration changes. For major version bumps, test in a staging environment first — run a copy of the service on different ports with the same volume data to validate the migration before touching production.

Version pinning: For stability, pin to a specific image tag in docker-compose.yml instead of latest. Update deliberately after reviewing the changelog. This trades automatic patch delivery for predictable behavior — the right call for business-critical services.

Post-update verification: After updating, confirm Gitea is functioning correctly. Most services expose a /health endpoint that returns HTTP 200 — curl it from the server or monitor it with your uptime tool.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does it cost to self-host Gitea?

The primary cost is your server. A Hetzner CAX11 (2 vCPU ARM, 4GB RAM) runs about $5/month — enough for Gitea plus a few companion services. Add a domain ($12/year) and you're under $75/year for a complete self-hosted deployment. Compare that to SaaS pricing that typically starts at $5-15/user/month.

Can I run Gitea on a VPS with other services?

Yes. The docker-compose.yml above isolates Gitea on its own named Docker network. As long as your server has sufficient RAM and disk — 4GB RAM and 20GB disk handles most combinations — running multiple self-hosted services on one VPS is both practical and common. Tools like Dozzle and Portainer make monitoring multi-container setups manageable.

How do I migrate data if I switch servers?

Stop the Gitea container, export the Docker volumes (using docker run --rm -v VOLUME:/data -v $(pwd):/backup alpine tar czf /backup/backup.tar.gz /data), transfer to the new server, restore the volumes, and update your DNS. Most migrations complete in under an hour. Test the restoration on the new server before decommissioning the old one.

What happens if Gitea releases a breaking update?

Pin your docker-compose.yml to a specific image tag (e.g., image: gitea:1.2.3 instead of latest). Subscribe to the GitHub releases page for advance notice. When you're ready to upgrade, read the release notes, back up first, test on a staging instance, then update production.

Is Gitea suitable for production use?

Yes, with the hardening described above: reverse proxy for HTTPS, firewall rules, regular backups, and a pinned image tag. Many teams run Gitea in production successfully. The main requirement is treating your self-hosted instance with the same operational discipline you'd apply to any business-critical service.

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