You need a simple Git server without the steep learning curve of Git SCM or overhead of running a GitLab instance.
Gogs is a performance-friendly
Git web interface written in the Go programming language.
It claims to make setting up and managing GIT painless;
let's test that!
In our case @dwyl,
we are mostly happy with the GitHub service. 👌
Except for a few annoying aspects of the interface
and the occasional outage, GitHub is good.
We are exploring having a Gogs server running as a
hot backup
which we can use when GitHub is unavailable
or if they ever lose our data!
The audience for this guide is "us"
@dwyl.
If anyone else finds it helpful that's a bonus.
Please ⭐ the repo if you find it useful. Thanks!
There are several options for running Gogs:
-
Directly on your main machine/workstation - can be advantageous in terms of setup speed, but clutters your main machine with a server that requires resources + maintenance.
-
On your machine using Docker - provides good isolation/separation, reasonably fast startup times and can be easily "killed" when no longer needed.
-
On a secondary computer e.g. RaspberryPi - complete isolation, more "hackable" and simulates production more closely. Obviously having a second machine is a luxury not everyone has. But we figure a $15 RasbperryPi Zero is not a stretch for most people doing DevOps.
-
On 3rd Party/Cloud Service e.g. AWS or Fly.io - perfect once you have decided
Gogsis for you and you want a Production instance for your project. We use Fly.io because it's:
a) Simplicity: deploying to Fly.io is much simpler than other VPS/Cloud services (AWS!).
b) Cheaper than an equivalent ($2/month)
c) Our main app already runs on Fly.io so having theGogs/Gitserver co-located is good for latency/speed/performance.
We chose to install Gogs on a RaspberryPi
for 3 reasons:
a) Keeps it fully isolated on a separate machine.
Which simulates "production".
b) Allows us to test connecting to it over a network. i.e. real world tests.
c) Means we can run the instance long-term
and store actual (backup) data on it.
There are quite a few steps for setting this up,
so we documented them in a separate doc.
See: /install-gogs-raspberrypi.md
Once we had setup the Gogs server on the RPi
with nginx and systemd to auto-boot
whenever we restart the RPi,
we tested connecting to Gogs on the RPi
and documented the steps:
/connect-to-raspberrypi.md
Once we confirmed that everything was working
on the local RaspberryPi,
we felt confident to deploy to Fly.io
Once we had everything working & tested
on the RaspberryPi,
we felt confident
so we deployed a "Production" instance to Fly.io.
See: https://github.com/dwyl/gogs-server
Pages we read on the journey: