I am off github — almost

2023-06-17

I'm not going to go deeply into the “why”, just know that this is part of my getting-off-the-clouds journey and I've grown more and more uncomfortable with the direction Microsoft is taking github as a whole and that they do with the data in there. I encourage you to do your own digging if you haven't heard of it yet, it won't be too difficult to find a few of the more controversial events surrounding github in the last few years.

Anyway, my journey… In the end this was much easier than expected.

I had already set up a privat gitea instance in May and moved almost all my public repositories there. My vanity took a small hit doing so but realistically no one is really going to miss my stuff.

Gitea continues to work flawlessly. It is extremely intuitive, offers all functionality I need and it does run on my Raspberry CM4 selfhosted server with around 200 MB RAM being used. That's not bad at all.

What was missing till now is a git repository that is publicly accessible for the few of my repos that actually need that.

I have one tiny virtual server online with a total of 500 MB RAM so running another gitea instance on that was out of question. I needed something slimmer.

In the end I've settled with two access routes as described in the official git documentation: Authenticated write-access through SSH public keys, and anonymous readonly-access through the git-daemon.

What this won't let me do is to have complicated control over who gets access to what repository but I believe that I don't need that for a while so this setup is good enough.

There really isn't much to say, just follow the setup steps in the official manual and you're set. Links below. Overall I believe it took me two to three hours with some testing. My tiny server is happily chugging along unimpressed by the new daemon that's running on it. In fact the monitoring graphs don't show an increase in resource consumption since the git daemon is up.

Ultimately the new setup is less comfortable — I cannot look at repositories and files from the browser, nor can my contributors. But it'll do, I'm sure.

what is left on github

I do retain my account on github. Plenty of interesting open source projects remain there so I want to have a way to contribute.

Also, I use github as my build chain for docker images. So my account still has some repositories for that. The docker images are built through github actions and the resulting containers are available on dockerhub, quay, and github as well.