As people around me discuss what to go for in regards to manage their growing number of private GIT repositories I joined their discussion.

A couple of years ago I assessed how I would want to store my collection of almost 100 GIT private repositories and all those cloned mirrors I want to keep for archival and sentimental reasons.

An option was to pay for GitHub. Another option, which most seemed to prefer, was going for a local Gitlab set-up.

All seemed not desirable. Like chaining my workflows to GitHub as a provider or adopting a new hobby to operate and maintain a private GitLab server. And as it might have become easier to operate a GitLab server with the introduction of container management systems. But I’ve always seemed to have to update to a new version when I actually wanted to use it.

So this was when I had to make the call for my own set-up about 4 years ago. We were using a rather well working GitLab set-up for work back then. But it all seemed overkill to me also back then.

So I found: gogs.io

It runs with one command, the only dependency is two file system directories with (a) the settings of gogs and (b) your repositories.

It’ll deploy as literally a SINGLE BINARY without any other things to consider. With the provided dockerfile you are up and running in seconds.

It has never let me down. It’s running and providing it’s service. And that’s the end of it.

I am using it, as said, for 95 private repositories and a lot of additionally mirrored GIT repositories. Gogs will support you by keeping those mirrors in sync for you in the background. It’s even multi-user multi-organization.