Are you bothered by how often GitHub has been down lately? Or maybe you’ve seen how many developers are ditching Microsoft’s code hosting platform. Regardless of why you’re looking to move away from GitHub, as a homelabber, you have one of the best reasons to leave ever: control.
It’s no secret that developers are leaving GitHub in droves
Every empire must fall
Ever since Microsoft purchased GitHub, it’s been a downhill slide. I’m a big GitHub user, and have been for about 15 years—maybe longer. The problem is, GitHub’s reliability has gone down since the purchase, not up.
Developers both big and small are looking to leave Microsoft’s version control platform, and it’s only getting worse. In fact, back in April, the developer of the Ghostty terminal emulator announced that the project would be leaving GitHub.
This is a pretty big deal, as Mitchell is GitHub user 1,299 as he joined the site back in 2008. Only 1,298 people joined before him.
The fact that Mitchell is pulling his quite sizable project off GitHub and moving elsewhere is telling of the landscape we’re in. If big projects can’t trust GitHub, then can homelabbers and self-hosters?
There are good hosted alternatives to GitHub
But they’re all plagued by the same problems
There are actually a lot of great GitHub alternatives out there. This is because what GitHub is doing is not proprietary at all. It’s just a great wrapper for git, which is a completely free and open source project.
That’s why so many other platforms have built their own wrappers for Git, like GitLab, Bitbucket, or Gitea. These are just three platforms that utilize git in their backend just like GitHub does, and offer to host your code for you.
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There really are a number of other platforms to choose from, for sure. The problem is, a hosted version control platform is great until it goes down. That’s exactly what is being experienced with GitHub. It’s a remote platform that sometimes becomes inaccessible.
So, if you stick to using another remote platform, then you’re plagued by the same problems that cause issues with GitHub. What else is there then? Well, there’s always self-hosting, and homelabbers are in the perfect position for it.
Self-hosting frees you from downtime and lets you regain control of your data
You’re in the driver’s seat
If you run a homelab, then you can run your own git server with relative ease. In fact, both GitLab and Gitea offer self-hosted versions of their platforms if you want a plug-and-play solution.
All you have to do is spin up a server inside of Docker and you’re ready to go. I ran my own git server for quite some time, and it’s honestly one of the easier pieces of infrastructure that you can run.
I can hear it already though, “But what about backups!” That’s easy—back up your git instance to somewhere. Backblaze B2 is relatively cheap at $6.95/TB/month, and that does break down by gigabyte, and your first 10GB is always free with them. So, if your git storage is under 10GB, it doesn’t even cost to use Backblaze.
If you go past that 10GB of storage, you’re paying about $0.0695 per 10GB above that. The pricing breaks down to approximately $0.00695 per GB that you need to store, so you can do the math from there (or backward from the $6.95 per TB price).
Backups aren’t the only thing to think about though. What about remote access? If you work with other developers that aren’t on your network, how can they access the code? Well, if you trust them, you can use something like Tailscale, or you can set up a reverse proxy or Cloudflare tunnel for them to use a traditional domain name.
There’s a number of ways to accomplish the same task, but it can all easily be done within your homelab. It’s also a great exercise to help you get more familiar with various parts of homelabbing and network engineering.
If you’re tired of relying on someone else’s uptime to keep your project going, just consider hosting it yourself. You already have the hardware, and the software is simple. All it takes is a few hours of your time.
Your homelab is capable of replacing way more than you think it is
Your homelab isn’t just for running Plex and Immich. It is actually an extremely capable place, even if you’re running on older hardware. You could even run your own git server on something like a Raspberry Pi—it doesn’t have to be beefy hardware.
So put your homelab to work and take control of your own git platform. Not only will you be in control of the uptime, you’ll also be the one who’s in control of the code. Microsoft can’t steal your code if it’s not on their servers.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
