Right now I have a NAS. I have to upgrade and maintain my NAS. That’s table stakes already. But that alone is sufficient to use bare git repos.
If I add Gitea or whatever, I have to maintain my NAS, and a container running some additional software, and some sort of web proxy to access it. And in a disaster recovery scenario I’m now no longer just restoring some files on disk, I have to rebuild an entire service, restore it’s config and whatever backing store it uses, etc.
Even if you don’t already have a NAS, setting up a server with some storage running SSH is already necessary before you layer in an additional service like Gitea, whereas it’s all you need to store and interact with bare git repos. Put the other way, Gitea (for example) requires me to deploy all the things I need to host bare repos plus a bunch of addition complexity. It’s a strict (and non-trivial) superset.
Tbh I’m a little confused I even have to justify this claim.
Absolutely. Every service you run, whether containerized or not, is software you have to upgrade, maintain, and back up. Containers don’t magically alleviate the need for basic software/service maintenance.
Agreed, which is why you’ll find in a subsequent comment I allow for the fact that in a multi-user scenario, a support service on top of Git makes real sense.
Given this post is joking about being ashamed of their code, I can only surmise that, like I’m betting most self-hosters, they’re not dealing with a multi-user use case.
Well, that or they want to limit their shame to their close friends and/or colleagues…
This post is about “self-hosting” a service, not using GitHub. That’s what I’m responding to.
I’m not saying GitHub isn’t valuable. I use it myself. And in any situation involving multiple collaborators I’d probably recommend that kind of tool–whether GitHub or some self-hosted option–for ease of user administration, familiar PR workflows, issue tracking, etc.
But if you’re a solo developer storing your code locally with no intention to share or collaborate, and you don’t want to use GitHub (as, again, is the case with this post) a self-hosted service adds a ton of complexity for only incremental value.
I suspect a ton of folks simply don’t realize that you don’t need anything more than ssh and git to push/pull remote git repositories because they largely cargo cult their way through source control.
The idea of “self-hosting” git is so incredibly weird to me. Somehow GitHub managed to convince everyone that Git requires some kind of backend service. Meanwhile, I just push private code to bare repositories on my NAS via SSH.
Honestly, for personal use I just switched to straight Markdown that I edit with Vim (w/ Vimwiki plugin) or Markor on Android and synchronize with Syncthing. Simple, low effort, portable, does enough of what I need to get the job done.
And if I wanna publish a read-only copy online I can always use an SSG.
It has the benefit that the container can’t start before the mount point is up without any additional scripts or kludges, so no race conditions or surprise behaviour. Using fstab can’t provide that guarantee. The other option is Autofs but it’s messier to configure and may not ship out of the box on modern distros.