If you own a domain, hosting Forgejo on a $5 Debian cloud server works perfectly for your personal use case. My site admin panel shows it’s using 75MB of actual RAM (not allocated/virtual), it’s truly very lightweight. Disk use is very low, just however big your git repos actually are is the key.

The internal SQlite database option is just fine, don’t need to bother with PostgreSQL if you’re only doing it for yourself (the DB only holds referential info, the actual git data is stored on disk in normal git directories). There’s a built in backup command so you can build a simple shell script to run the dump command periodically and back up the entire thing to a tarball.

re: Codeberg, the only “downside” (not really) is they are for FOSS licensed projects only and frown upon using their service for your personal private non FOSS needs (they’re not draconian about it, but it’s part of the ethos the service is for FOSS licensed projects to use).

Pretty much yes, codeberg integrates some additional services and branding on top (such as codeberg-pages for static page hosting or forgejo-runners for CI) but you can integrate those yourself as well, it’s just extra work.

If you’re looking for an open alternative to github/gitlab codeberg is imo definitely the way to go

Incoming wall of text

Here is my install script to set up Ubuntu since it has a bit of extra steps for privileged ports https://gitlab.meme.beer/-/snippets/1

Docker compose example, note that my config has a shared network with containers in another compose called nginx to keep traffic inside docker.

name: "gitlab"
services:
  gitlab:
    image: 'gitlab/gitlab-ce:latest'
    #command: update-permissions
    restart: always
    hostname: 'gitlab.example.com'
    environment:
      GITLAB_OMNIBUS_CONFIG: |
        external_url 'https://gitlab.example.com'

        pages_external_url 'https://pages.example.com'
        pages_nginx['enable'] = true
        pages_nginx['listen_port'] = 6000
        pages_nginx['listen_https'] = false
        pages_nginx['redirect_http_to_https'] = false

        #puma['per_worker_max_memory_mb'] = 2048 # 2GB

        gitlab_rails['gitlab_email_from'] = 'gitlab@mailer.example.com'
        gitlab_rails['gitlab_email_display_name'] = 'GitLab'
        gitlab_rails['smtp_enable'] = true
        gitlab_rails['smtp_address'] = "smtp.sendgrid.net"
        gitlab_rails['smtp_port'] = 587
        gitlab_rails['smtp_user_name'] = 'apikey'
        gitlab_rails['smtp_password'] = '$SENDGRID_API_KEY_HERE'
        gitlab_rails['smtp_domain'] = "smtp.sendgrid.net"
        gitlab_rails['smtp_authentication'] = "login"
        gitlab_rails['smtp_enable_starttls_auto'] = true
        gitlab_rails['smtp_tls'] = false

        gitlab_rails['gitlab_default_theme'] = 2

        gitlab_rails['gitlab_shell_ssh_port'] = 2224

        gitlab_rails['gitlab_default_projects_features_container_registry'] = true
        gitlab_rails['registry_enabled'] = true
        gitlab_rails['registry_api_url'] = 'https://registry.example.com'
        gitlab_rails['registry_issuer'] = 'gitlab-issuer'
        registry['log_level'] = 'info'
        registry_external_url 'https://registry.example.com'
        registry_nginx['enable'] = true
        registry_nginx['listen_port'] = 5050
        registry_nginx['listen_https'] = false
        registry_nginx['redirect_http_to_https'] = false

        gitlab_shell['log_level'] = 'INFO'
        letsencrypt['enable'] = false
        nginx['error_log_level'] = 'info'
        nginx['listen_https'] = false
        #nginx['proxy_protocol'] = true
        #nginx['trusted_proxies'] = ["10.0.0.0/8", "172.16.0.0/12", "192.168.0.0/16"]

        # Workhorse
        gitlab_workhorse['enable'] = true
        gitlab_workhorse['ha'] = false
        gitlab_workhorse['listen_network'] = "tcp"
        gitlab_workhorse['listen_addr'] = "127.0.0.1:8181"
        gitlab_workhorse['log_directory'] = "/var/log/gitlab/gitlab-workhorse"

        # Errors
	# for sentry error logging the GitLab service
        #gitlab_rails['sentry_enabled'] = true
        #gitlab_rails['sentry_dsn'] = ''
        #gitlab_rails['sentry_clientside_dsn'] = ''
        #gitlab_rails['sentry_environment'] = 'production'
        # Add any other gitlab.rb configuration here, each on its own line
    networks:
      - nginx
    ports:
      # gitlab loves https on 443
      #- '80:80'
      #- '443:443'
      - '2224:22'
    volumes:
      - ./config:/etc/gitlab
      - ./logs:/var/log/gitlab
      - ./data:/var/opt/gitlab
    shm_size: '256m'
    #deploy:
    #  resources:
    #    limits:
    #      cpus: '6'
    #      memory: 12G
    #    reservations:
    #      cpus: '4'
    #      memory: 6G
    # disable healthcheck for restoring backup
    #healthcheck:
    #  disable: true
networks:
  nginx:
    external: true
    name: nginx