Own Your Code: Getting Started with Forgejo for Private Git Hosting

GitHub is indispensable, but not every line of code belongs on a third-party server. Internal tools, proprietary algorithms, configuration scripts, and client work products often contain sensitive logic that should stay on your infrastructure. Forgejo is a lightweight, self-hosted Git service that gives you the core of GitHub -- repositories, pull requests, issue tracking, CI/CD, and package hosting -- on your own hardware.

What Forgejo Offers

Forgejo is a community-driven fork of Gitea, focused on remaining fully open-source and independently governed. It provides Git repository hosting with a clean web interface, pull request workflows with code review, issue tracking with labels and milestones, a CI/CD system with runners, and a package registry for Docker, npm, and other artifacts. It is written in Go, runs as a single binary, and sips resources -- a $5/month VPS can comfortably host dozens of repositories.

Forgejo supports SSH and HTTPS access, organizations and teams with role-based permissions, webhooks, and an API for automation. It also includes migration tools to import repositories from GitHub, GitLab, and other platforms with full issue and PR history.

Who Needs This

An agency managing client websites should version control every theme, plugin, and configuration in a private Forgejo instance rather than scattered ZIP files. A development shop building internal business tools can collaborate with pull requests and CI/CD without exposing code to a public platform. Anyone handling proprietary algorithms, financial models, or compliance-sensitive code benefits from keeping it on infrastructure they control.

Forgejo is MIT licensed and deployed via Docker or a single binary. VPS1 deploys and maintains Forgejo as part of our development infrastructure services. See our Forgejo software page for details.