Gitea

Self-hosted Git with a web UI, issues and pull requests. A few hundred MB of Go that starts in a second, where the alternative is a JVM and a shopping list of services.

This is the stack the rest of this repo is developed against — the compose files you're reading live in a Gitea instance, and GitHub is the mirror.

Quick start

cp .env.example .env
$EDITOR .env            # PUID/PGID must match the owner of ./gitea
docker compose up -d

Open http://<host>:3000. You get Gitea's install wizard, not a login page — it writes app.ini from what you enter and that's the moment the instance is configured. Two things to settle there rather than later:

Server and Third-Party Service Settings → Base URL. Set it to the URL people will actually use. Wrong here means every clone URL it hands out is wrong.
Create the admin account at the bottom of the wizard. If you skip it, the first user to register becomes the administrator — which is fine on a LAN and not fine on anything reachable.

Ports

Port	Proto	Purpose
3000	http	Web UI and the HTTP(S) clone endpoint
222	ssh	SSH clone endpoint (container listens on 22)

Why it looks like this

It started as upstream's example — Install with Docker — with four changes to bring it in line with the rest of this repo, listed at the end of this section. Everything else is upstream's, and what follows is what those choices actually mean.

SQLite by default. There's no database container here, and none is needed: with no GITEA__database__DB_TYPE set, Gitea uses SQLite inside /data. For one person or a small team that is genuinely the right answer — one less container, one less backup, and the performance ceiling is far above what a personal instance reaches. Upstream documents MySQL and PostgreSQL variants using GITEA__database__DB_TYPE=mysql / postgres; switch if you outgrow it, and do it before there's data to migrate.

USER_UID / USER_GID exist because of the bind mount. ./gitea:/data is a host directory, so the git user inside the container has to match whoever owns it. Upstream notes that named volumes avoid the problem entirely — Docker manages ownership — at the cost of your data being somewhere less obvious.

SSH is on 222, not 22, because 22 on the host belongs to the host's own sshd. This is the source of the most common Gitea confusion: see the gotchas.

Environment variables map to app.ini sections with the pattern GITEA__section__KEY. So GITEA__server__ROOT_URL sets ROOT_URL under [server]. Useful to know, because the wizard only exposes a fraction of what Gitea can be told.

What was changed from upstream's example

Four things, all for the same reason — this file is published, and a fresh clone has to work:

${PUID:-1000} / ${PGID:-1000} instead of bare ${PUID}. Compose interpolates an unset variable to an empty string and starts the container anyway, so upstream's version hands Gitea USER_UID= on any clone without a .env. Defaults are the convention here for exactly this reason.
restart: unless-stopped instead of always, so a deliberate stop survives a reboot.
${DATA_PATH:-./data} instead of ./gitea, which also stops the data landing at the slightly comic gitea/gitea/.
Pinned to 1.27.3 instead of :latest, because Gitea runs schema migrations between releases.

Two settings are also present but commented out — GITEA__server__SSH_PORT and GITEA__server__ROOT_URL — because both are things you will need the moment you publish this beyond localhost. See the gotchas.

Gotchas

SSH clone URLs advertise the wrong port by default. Gitea knows it listens on 22 inside the container; it has no idea you published it on 222. So it offers git@host:user/repo.git, which sends the client to port 22 — the host's sshd — and the failure looks like a key problem rather than a port problem. Uncomment GITEA__server__SSH_PORT in compose.yaml (it tracks SSH_PORT, so the two can't drift), or set the SSH port in the wizard.
Behind a reverse proxy, ROOT_URL is the setting that matters. Get it wrong and the UI works fine while every clone URL, webhook and OAuth redirect points somewhere else. See reverse proxy, which already lists Gitea as a service needing this.
The install wizard runs once. After it writes app.ini, that file wins — changing an environment variable afterwards does not change a setting the wizard already recorded. Edit gitea/gitea/conf/app.ini (or delete it and reinstall) if you need to change course.
First registered user becomes admin if you didn't create an admin in the wizard. Disable registration once your accounts exist: GITEA__service__DISABLE_REGISTRATION=true.
Back up ./gitea. It holds every repository, the SQLite database, and conf/app.ini. There is nothing else to back up, and nothing in it regenerates.
Mirror pushes need credentials that outlive your session. If you push from here to GitHub, that's an access token or deploy key stored in Gitea, not your laptop's agent.

Exposing it

Publishes plain HTTP; TLS belongs at the proxy.

Reverse proxy with Caddy — needs ROOT_URL, see above. HTTP clone and the web UI both go through it.
Cloudflare Tunnel — works for the web UI and HTTP clone, but SSH clone won't pass and the ~100 MB body cap will meet you at the first large push. Fine for browsing, awkward as your only route.
Single sign-on with Authentik — Gitea speaks OIDC natively, so use that rather than forward auth, which would break git over HTTP as surely as it breaks any other non-browser client.

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