Git Without a Forge

Git without a forge [Simon Tatham, 2025-03-05] Introduction I’ve written quite a lot of free software in my life. Most of it was from scratch: projects I started myself. So I get to choose where to host them – or rather, I have to choose where to host them. These days, all my projects are held in Git. And mostly, I put them in ‘bare’ git repositories on my personal website. I don’t use any git ‘forge’ system layered on top of Git, like Gitlab or Github, which automatically makes a bug tracking database for each project, and provides a convenient button for a user to open a merge request / pull request. I just use plain Git. People can ‘ git clone ’ my code, and there’s a web-based browsing interface (the basic gitweb ) for looking around without having to clone it at all. But that’s all the automated facilities you get. Occasionally this confuses people, so I thought I should write something about it. Purposes of this article Sometimes people just can’t work out how to send me ... Read full article.