Forgejo
Community-governed soft fork of Gitea for self-hosted Git hosting. Feature-compatible with Gitea, with a focus on transparency, freedom from commercial control, and ActivityPub federation
Quick Start
docker run -d --name forgejo -p 3000:3000 -p 22:22 -v forgejo:/data codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo:latest Overview
Forgejo is a soft fork of Gitea created in 2022 when Gitea’s development team formed a commercial company, Gitea Ltd, and transferred the trademark and governance of the project to it. A group of contributors forked the project to preserve community ownership of the codebase and governance structure. The result is Forgejo: feature-compatible with Gitea, developed independently, and stewarded by the Codeberg e.V. non-profit association.
Because Forgejo maintains full API and feature compatibility with Gitea, it works with anything that targets the Gitea API — GitHub Actions runner workflows, CI integrations, IDE Git clients, and mirror configurations all behave the same way. Migration from Gitea is a configuration change, not a data conversion.
ActivityPub federation is the distinctive long-term goal that separates Forgejo from Gitea. The project is building support for repositories, issues, and pull requests to be followable and interactable from Mastodon and other Fediverse-compatible platforms. In practice this means a developer could follow a repository’s activity from their Mastodon account, or interact with issues without creating an account on the hosting instance. This is experimental and not yet complete, but it represents a fundamentally different vision for code hosting than any GitHub alternative is pursuing.
For most self-hosters choosing between Forgejo and Gitea, the practical difference today is small — the codebases are close, and daily usage feels identical. The choice comes down to whether community governance and the federation roadmap matter to you.
Forgejo: Pros & Cons
| Pros (The Wins) | Cons (The Friction) |
|---|---|
| Gitea-compatible: Drop-in replacement; existing repos and CI workflows migrate. | Smaller ecosystem: Some third-party tools target Gitea specifically, not Forgejo. |
| Community governed: Codeberg e.V. non-profit; no commercial control. | Experimental federation: ActivityPub integration not yet production-ready. |
| Federation roadmap: Repos followable from Mastodon and Fediverse. | Governance overhead: Committee decisions can slow release cadence. |
| Codeberg hosted: Largest public instance as reference deployment. | Star count context: Codeberg stars not directly comparable to GitHub metrics. |
Use Cases
Specific ways to use Forgejo for your workflow.
Deployment Strategy
Recommended ways to host Forgejo in your own environment.