Creating self/community-hosted replacement(s) for GitHub

We are running a community base gitlab on cloudron at https://gitlab.divvydao.net. Installation was a breeze. We have not enabled any federated login yet. It seems to use a lot of system resources and I would not put a lot of projects on one instance. I worry that a project becoming too successful will overload the system. We are using it for projects not ready due to security concerns etc to be put publically on github later. The intention is to publish on github when we go public.

This is quite interesting: https://superuser.com/questions/1162907/setting-up-an-encrypted-git-repository
I have a very strong desire to move away from github, since the Microsoft fiasco. As usual.

Will keep an eye on this space

Sure, but setting up a private Git repo is not the problem. That's easy
if you are comfortable using Git on the command line. You can do it on
any computer you can install Git on. There are ways to allow certain
people to pull and push from a private repo, and you can also make it
public. That's not the service that makes GH unique.

Neither is providing a web interface for interacting with Git repos.
There are various free code packages for hosting a web front-end for
Git, including GitLab, Gogs, Gitea, Phabricator, and possibly others.
Many organizations and projects now use one of these for their own
community-hosted web front-end for Git:
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/List_of_Community-Hosted_GitLab_Instances

What makes GitHub unique is simply it's network effect. It's a place where
there are many, many projects, and many, many developers have accounts
there. This is what both ForgeFed and Sr.ht are attempt to replace, by
providing a common protocol that can be used to connect up community
hosted Git forges,

Well, thats very thorough, thank you.

My operating system has basic version control built into the user-interface layer, but the perspective is slightly different, because it operates at the point of decision, rather than at the point of storage.

still, I expect we will use git as it is excellent.

I assume in the last paragraph you are referring to the NetworkEffect of GitHub. Yes, we need to build a bilateral gateway between github and whatever other tools we intend to migrate to. This is the way to deal with the network effect in any scenario

Be prepared to have your predictions come true

ᐧ

Please note that Cloudron cannot be considered Free software, since they tie their users to a central organisation.

• https://github.com/libresh/libre.sh/issues/144#issuecomment-367701427

We're also using GitLab, also for project management via issues and boards, and offer an instance at lab.allmende.io. Other known instances are framagit.org, git.indie.host, next to others.

Trivia: Since Redmine has been mentionned here, and people are also asking about nice group organisation interfaces, I can only suggest to have a look at https://taiga.io, which started out with the code name "Greenmine" ;)

@jonrichter

Please note that Cloudron cannot be considered Free software, since they tie their users to a central organisation.

This is exactly the sort of discussion that this group is useful for. Can you supply more details about this? The GH link you provided here gives a links to another thread in this group, which in turn features this link:
https://cloudron.io/documentation/installation/#cloudron-store-setup

On the face of it, the situation seems similar to Docker and DockerHub. The software itself is free code, published under an FSF-approved license. But as you say, the default install is set up to use a non-free network service, that can be used to install proprietary add-ons. Docker can be used without DockerHub and still be useful. Is this the case with Cloudron, or is it useless without the non-free app store?

Last year we've been running some Cloudron instances, and at first it matched very well with the ideas we had with the #CommonsCloud project, in that it provides a unified user account and a catalogue of free software webapps. Their setup makes maintenance really easy, and you can have their remote update service for a low cost. I have been in conversations with Johannes and his co-founder, and I understand their model for sustainability. So far I haven't found any non-free dependency. Now I don't recall about their app store but thought it was already or was going to be free, how's the status on that?
What @jonrichter says about a "central organisation" isn't really disqualifying it as free software. But I also would like a more decentralised set-up, which one could develop based on the CloudRon setup.
That said, with CommonsCloud.coop we decided to part ways and base our infrastructure on a combination of:
* an LDAP scheme prepared for decentralised nodes/clusters with users that can belong to collectives and have access to services at a node
* we built a webclient to manage the onboarding and allow for the decentralised management of collectives at a node
* ansible scripts, building on and contributing to the work of WebArchitects, for the quick deployment of NextCloud/Discourse/Phabricator + Zabbix monitoring + nightly backups + a synchronised local copy of the LDAP consumer
I'm sure our lead developer Chris Fanning can explain better; we're documenting on our Phabricator instance,. The code is on gitLab so far, but we will open a git repo at the Phabricator project platform soon.
I think an important difference lies in the sustainability model. The Cloudron team makes a living from maintenance fees and SaaS services. CommonsCloud is co-owned by its users through the cooperative and seeks to be sustainable based on contributions from users and collectives that want dedicated instances authenticating with their CommonsCloud account. Our vision is to emancipate users in this process, so they learn what is possible and decide+commit to make ongoing improvements and additional network services.

Thank you all for these wise remarks. Indeed it is tricky to find a suitable environment for managing cloud environments, if one doesn't want to stick to Kubernetes right from the start. Portainer was another alternative, but also has caveats at hands. By strictly binding to Docker Swarm, or single docker nodes, it gives us the ominous vendor lock-in the Open Container Initiative tried to avoid. I'm not certainly sure if we get there, soon. The technical stacks are often prepared and growing in very specific environments. The modularity of swappable components will still need to agree on certain protocols and conventions to do things.

In my understanding the Cloudron App store is not free, and as such its whole computing environment. When running a libre cluster environment, we want to make sure all parts can be reproduced locally.

Please feel highly invited to share views on this with the emerging LibreHosters network:

• Site: https://libreho.st
• Chat: https://riot.allmende.io/#/room/#librehosters:matrix.allmende.io

Is it ok if we keep this thread on topic (Creating self/community-hosted replacement(s) for GitHub), and open a new thread to discuss the hosting options for organizations wanting to run their own "cloud" in full software freedom? I, for one, have often found myself very confused by all this talk of Cloudron and Kubernetes and OpenStack and Sandstorm and other similar systems, and it would be great to have a thread specifically for pooling our knowledge of these systems, how they compare to each other, and what they are useful for (or not).

Just an fyi for those interested: hack.aragon.one