Forgejo on Bare Metal

We've been running our own instance of Forgejo on a dedicated server from OVH for two months. We pay $44/month for a Xeon-E 2136 6c/12t box with 64GB of memory and dual 512GB SSD NVMe disks.

Workflows run on the same machine and performance has been great compared to hosted GitHub.

Here are some tips to help you be successful if you're considering migrating.

Do Run on Bare Metal

With Kheeper the setup is the same whether you boot on the cloud or bare metal. Either way, your whole machine from the OS to the app to the config is stored in the registry and pushed to the target box. OVH has great prices on older servers. You can expect to get over twice the performance running on dedicated servers that you'd get at a cloud provider for the same price.

Don't Expect Your Community to Follow

If you have an open source project and you've got community engagement on GitHub, then you should either leave that project there or mirror it from your Forgejo instance.

Do Start with Our Public Image

We've been dogfooding our public Forgejo image. This has some built-in design decisions you may not agree with down the road. For instance, we run an action runner on the same machine with capacity 12. But when evaluating, it's great to have the convenience of a runner already authenticated and ready to handle workflows.

Don't Boot the Public App Directly

We treat the public Forgejo image as an opinionated base and extend it. There are more tools we want to be available to workflows. Rather than trying to provide some version of every common dev tool, we just provide the essentials and expect users to bake in their own.

Since we use make, our Containerfile starts like this:

FROM us.kheeper.com/public/forgejo:v0.7.0

RUN dnf install -y make

Not only is this a performance gain, it also ensures reproducibility. You know exactly what version of your tool is on the machine and you don't have to wait for it to be installed in a step of every workflow.

Do Ask for Help

Enterprises have separate teams that maintain their GitLab or GitHub Enterprise installs. But one of the reasons we built Kheeper was that we believe there's a ton of great open source software like Forgejo that even small teams can operate without cutting into feature work. Bootc is the technology that enables this by simplifying ops. We want to see the self-hosted open source ecosystem flourish and we'd be glad to guide you through the journey. Reach out to hello@kheeper.com.