Taking Control of Your Code with a Self-Hosted Gitea Server
#gitea #git #selfhosted #devops #coding #php
For years, my code has lived on GitHub. It’s the industry standard for a reason: it’s robust, collaboration is seamless, and it’s the heart of the open-source community. For my public and professional work, it's indispensable. However, for my dozens of private projects, experiments, and snippets, I've always felt a slight disconnect. I was relying on a third-party service for code that is deeply personal or in its very early, chaotic stages.
The main issue wasn't trust, but sovereignty and simplicity. I wanted a space that was entirely my own, without the public-facing pressure or the feature bloat of a massive platform. I considered self-hosting a full GitLab instance, but much like my experience with Mastodon, it felt too resource-heavy for my needs. I just wanted a fast, private, and reliable Git server.
That’s when I turned to Gitea.
Gitea is a lightweight, open-source Git server that's incredibly easy to set up. It's a community fork of Gogs and is written in Go, which means it runs as a single binary and has remarkably low resource requirements. I was able to get it running in a Docker container on my own server in under 30 minutes.
The power of having a personal Gitea instance is threefold:
Total Privacy: All my code, commit history, and issues are on my own hardware. There's no question about data ownership or who might be scanning my repositories.
Blazing Speed: Pushing and pulling from a server on my local network (or a close-by cloud server) is noticeably faster than going through a major commercial service.
Simplicity & Control: The interface is clean and familiar, providing all the core features you’d expect (repos, pull requests, issue tracking, wikis) without the overwhelming complexity of larger platforms. It's everything you need and nothing you don't.
Setting up Gitea has given me the perfect private workspace. It complements my public work on GitHub while providing a secure, fast, and fully-owned home for all my personal development. For any developer who values data ownership and a streamlined workflow, it’s a self-hosting project I highly recommend.