You know the saying, "so many [something], so little time", in my case it's time and I think this has somehow become my un-offical mantra deep inside. I have so many things I want to do, but somehow I never get around to do them. I'm not sure if it's because I'm lazy, or if it's because I'm afraid of failing, or if it's because I'm afraid of succeeding. I'm not sure what it is, but I highly suspect that it's the undiagnozed ADHD I know I have.
I'm the imposter that never seems to get anything done and yet is known as the guy who knows his shit somehow!
Github thoughts
After listening to latest podcast episode of Linux Dev Time on their Patreon (episode 101), where they talk about how everyone, or at least the majority of people, seems to be hosting their code at Github which is now owned by Microsoft. A company that does a lot of shady things and is connected to OpenAI through very deep pockets, well it got me thinking.
Do I actually need Github in my life?
I've mainly just had private repos (a lot of them!) and a couple of public ones, I don't use Github to the same degree as a lot of others it seems. I don't use Github actions, the issues to my projects are all put there by me when I am developing someting and I'm not on Github to "get coder famous" as one person said. I am simply using Github as a remote Git backup of my code with a fancy webGUI. So I asked myself, can't I just selfhost this and enjoy life knowing Microsoft won't be scraping whatever crap code I put there? (I'm thinking of others not being forced to suggestions made from my code by Github CoPilot you know!)
Selfhosting setup
So, enter GitBucket! Which was what I tried to use at first. I started a new VPS machine at Linode (a Nanode as they call it) and set up Debian 12 on the server. When I started this and just after I finished installing Nginx Proxy Manager, I posted about it on Hachyderm.io and was also pointed in the direction of Gitea and after a few minutes checking out the features I decided to swap out GitBucket for Gitea. So I installed Docker, created the docker-compose.yml file they define on the Gitea page and changed the proxy settings in Nginx Proxy Manager so it would point at the correct port. I also disabled the SystemD service I had created for GitBucket.
What I was most pleased about Gitea was that it's SSH server worked out of the box on an alternative port, I hadn't gotten it to work on GitBucket yet and had thought I'd have to change my methods for pushing from SSH to HTTPS or something for a time.
After installing Gitea I started to move all my repos from Github to my new code-home.
Afterthought
I can't say I am a prolific writer of code, but what I downloaded from Github and uploaded to my new Gitea instance was 1.2GB of code uncompressed. The Linode machine seems to handle it fine and the load on the VPS is barely noticable since this is just an instance for myself. I think I'll be very happy in the long run with this change. I did leave a couple of public repos up on Github, that I also moved to my Gitea instance, but I will only be updating them on my instance.
I'll soon link to the new site after I go over all settings and such, close down registrations, go over security settings and such. Hopefully this change will help me a bit with my focus and productivity, god knows I need it!
Happy coding!