Back in August, I left GitHub. I tried using git in iCloud Drive. After that didn’t work, I spun up a Gitea server. Well, I just deleted that server.
Don’t get me wrong, Gitea is a great product. It just ended up being too much for what I needed. I was also running into issues with it being super slow. I don’t think that was Gitea’s fault, but the whole VM started crawling. So I started thinking, what do I actually need.
Less is More
All I need, is a server to sync git stuff, and a cloud backup. That’s it. No fancy interface1, no fancy anything. So I spun up a new VM, and started playing.
My thought was, to just run a bare git server. No third party software managing anything. Just git, SSH, and that’s it.
Setup was stupid easy. I just installed git, made a git user, and that was it. Repos are stored in /home/git/<REPO NAME>. That got cloning working, and WorkingCopy on my iPhone was able to list all the repos on the sever, without anything else.
As for the cloud back up, my old way was to rclone an automated disk image backup made by ProxMox up to B2. That was pretty bulky, as it contained a while Linux install, along with the data. My new server, just handles the back up itself. Syncing the git user folder to B2. Simpler.
How is it?
A lot, snapier. I don’t have to wait for it to think, like the old server. I think that more has to do with the underlying OS. The old one was running on TurnKey Linux, based on Debian 12. The new one is running FreeBSD.
I still have some more things to work on. Mainly some helper scripts, for making new repos on the server side. But so far, I’m happy with this.