Basically, what the title says. I’m a C, C+, C# … Basically, a C languages dev. Work on Video Games mostly, but I like doing other projects as well. Working on some larger ones like in Unreal and Godot that need some big boy space / CI time so I’ve set off on a small self hosting journey.
Got Nginx set up with Gitea at the moment, but am open to Gitlab, etc.
I was wondering if it’s easy to setup these services for LFS space / CI runtime rental for a few buddies of mine just to handle management and potential rental costs depending on how far that goes.
I’m also wondering if Gitea or GitLab would be better for an endeavor like this? And I realize I wouldn’t make a huge profit or anything, this would mostly be to mitigate maintenance costs and give my buddies some good deals on CI run time for Unreal or Godot Exports.
deleted by creator
I wouldn’t even think about charging anyone for anything until you get it all setup and dialed in with backups, etc and are sure you know how to keep the service running.
Yes, I have the infrastructure setup. Shits got like 3 backups including a very hard offline 12 TB backup WD blue drive that’s absolutely purely for being nothing but backups for this server
You already have others saying the same but +1 for GOGS. Very easy to deploy and rock solid from my own experiences. Not too heavy, not too thin on features with the WebUI. Just right.
I personally actually use Forgejo with Forgejo Runner It gives me a fully self-hosted experience that feels just like Github, and Forgejo Actions is nearly 1:1 with Github Actions
About CI Rental thought, never touched there, but maybe not that hard? Probably Jenkins or Drone CI has support for it
And LFS, AFAIK both Gitea and Forgejo have support for it(just need to enable on the app.ini)
If you don’t have a uniform infrastructure, nobody will want to use your spare compute you have lying around.
Every hosted solution already has free tiers and free CI runners, so the question is why would they pay you for the privilege?
And that’s a fair question. I’m also considering renting a VPS for this, so shouldn’t be too bad on the infrastructure part. And it’d mostly be a few buddies and myself using this.
Even if it doesn’t work out for me, hopefully this thread can be informative for others as well :)
Gitlab is monstrous bloat, gogs and descendants run fine on small cheap vps.
I personally like to run gitlab. You can disable the services you don’t need, like metrics services, grafana, prometheus. And you could even enable services you might want like docker container registey or package registey.
I love to work with gitlab locally on my homelab. I also have multiple runners setup, which pick up my docker jobs. Etc
I like gogs. Automated backups and then deployment seemed super easy with gogs but not so with gitea.
Gitlab seemed like a heavy weight for my needs.
You do you regarding hosting for friends. I wouldn’t do it. I self host as much stuff as I can and I’m happy to bear the responsibility for my own stuff, but taking responsibility for someone elses stuff and access to that stuff is a whole other level.
One thing I’ve learned over the years, is that making something work today is only a small part of the job. Ensuring that it works every day for the next 5 years is the real challenge.
