Gitea

TAS Score: S3/3 — D4/5 — A3 / T2 D4 not D5: Gitea Ltd. (for-profit company) controls development direction. The community forked to Forgejo over governance concerns (Q8). Commercial features (Gitea Actions cloud runners) are being developed for the hosted offering.

Brief Description

Lightweight self-hosted Git service. Fork of Gogs, written in Go. Provides Git hosting, issue tracking, pull requests, wikis, and CI/CD (Gitea Actions). Fast, low resource usage, easy to deploy. Gitea is the upstream of Forgejo.

Architectural Role

Applications/dev layer: self-hosted GitHub alternative. Hosts Git repositories, manages code review, tracks issues. Gitea Actions provides CI/CD. Lighter than GitLab, more features than bare Git.

Technical Autonomy

✅ Works without internet (all Git operations are local after clone)
✅ Stores data locally (Git repos + SQLite/PostgreSQL)
✅ Does not require external accounts
✅ Allows data export (Git repos are standard, dump command for metadata)
✅ Mirrors and federation support

Philosophical Assessment (whose.world criteria)

Criterion	Status	Comments
Pause	✅	Stop container, repos stay on disk.
Exit	✅	Git repos are standard. `gitea dump` exports everything. Migrate to Forgejo, GitLab, or bare Git.
Recoverability	✅	Database + repo directory backup.
Visibility	✅	MIT license. Full source on GitHub.
External Dependencies	✅	Fully self-contained.

Configuration (Minimal)

services:
  gitea:
    image: gitea/gitea:latest
    container_name: gitea
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
      - "2222:22"
    volumes:
      - ./data/gitea:/data
    environment:
      - USER_UID=1000
      - USER_GID=1000
    restart: unless-stopped

Developer Workstation

Alternatives

Alternative	Autonomy	Notes
Forgejo	A3 / T2	Community fork of Gitea. Non-profit governance. Recommended over Gitea for new deployments.
GitLab CE	A3 / T2	Full DevOps platform. Much heavier, more features.
GitHub	A0 / T0	Cloud-only, proprietary. The service Gitea replaces.

Trajectory

Direction: mixed.

Gitea was community-driven until 2022 when Gitea Ltd. was created as a for-profit company, transferring the domain and trademark from the community. This triggered the Forgejo fork (under Codeberg e.V., a non-profit). Gitea remains MIT-licensed and functional, but governance is now corporate. For new deployments, Forgejo is recommended due to its non-profit governance model.

Signal assessment:

Signal	Status	Evidence
License	✅	MIT, unchanged.
Feature gating	⚠️	Gitea Ltd. developing commercial cloud features. Self-hosted version still full-featured.
Self-hosting	✅	Easy to deploy, lightweight, well documented.
Governance	⚠️	For-profit company (Gitea Ltd.) controls direction. Community forked to Forgejo in response.

Signal key: ✅ opening · ➖ neutral · ⚠️ closing

Sources

Website: gitea.com
Repository: github.com/go-gitea/gitea
Docker image: gitea/gitea