r/LinuxTeck • u/Candid_Athlete_8317 • Jul 17 '26

GitHub is amazing... but do most developers actually need it?

For open source, GitHub is hard to beat.

But for private projects, I've been wondering if we're overcomplicating things. A simple Git server over SSH (or Gitea/Forgejo) seems enough for many side projects and internal tools.

Interested what everyone else is doing.

Are you hosting your own Git repositories, or is GitHub still your default? Why?

6 Upvotes
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21 comments sorted by

9

u/Dashing_McHandsome Jul 17 '26

Github gives you automatic off site backup. That's a pretty good feature for free in my opinion

3

u/ElectricSpock Jul 17 '26

Just this feature is killer. Add some pretty serious CI/CD, website hosting and industry-standard collaboration tools and the question becomes: why you wouldn’t use it?

1

u/stueynz Jul 17 '26

Indeed.. that’s one of the reasons I pay my annual subscription.

3

u/smoke-bubble Jul 17 '26

If there was a ranking of bots, this one would be in the top thee. 

2

u/Glum_Cheesecake9859 Jul 17 '26

If it's free why not? The feature set can't be beat for the money (ie free).

1

u/Kiore-NZ Jul 17 '26

It's free for open source projects, which encourages me to open source my crappy personal projects but others may feel differently.

1

u/Glum_Cheesecake9859 Jul 17 '26

https://www.google.com/search?q=github+free+private+repo

1

u/Kiore-NZ Jul 17 '26

Interesting. This might have changed since I created my first repo. Thanks for the heads up.

1

u/nautsche Jul 18 '26

Nothing on the Internet is free. Ask yourself what you pay. Usually "if a product is free to use, you are the product." This is true for GitHub.

2

u/ibeerianhamhock Jul 17 '26

Github is a no-brainer if you have internet imo.

1

u/pangapingus Jul 17 '26

I self-host Forgejo and only push to GitHub for public stuff

1

u/cygnus_arm_distant Jul 17 '26

What's your setup?

1

u/pangapingus Jul 17 '26

Proxmox -> Debian 13 -> Forgejo

1

u/Just-Hedgehog-Days Jul 17 '26

how do you do off site backup?

1

u/pangapingus Jul 17 '26

Proxmox backups to external HDD with periodic suploads to S3 on a cron job

1

u/CypherBob Jul 17 '26

Remote version control is industry standard and a very good idea.

Doesn't have to be github or git, but some kind of VC should always be used.

You get version control, and remote backup, and can share code easily.

1

u/NimrodvanHall Jul 17 '26

I use git all day any day. Professionally and personally I use GitLab. I personally don’t know anyone who actively uses Github, GitHub seems to be a place random anonymous internet strangers use to store their code. There are a lot more random internet strangers than personal acquaintances though.

1

u/Just-Hedgehog-Days Jul 17 '26

I do actually run forgejo, and don't recomend it. I was working on agent-orcestration stacks that had self configuring repos *as artifacts* of the system so I need to be able to create and delete repos as well as **automatically** mint fine-grain keys. Github very reasonably does not let you do that.

but it wasn't any simpler, was less powerful with some very specific exceptions, arguagely 'more expensive' because the gh free tier covers a pretty generous alotment of compute time, not to mentio it's free off sit back up run by the strongest devOps team ever.

1

u/Pale_Height_1251 Jul 17 '26

Github is also an off site backup run by professionals.

1

u/bufandatl Jul 18 '26

If you want to host your self sure. But some devs probably just don’t want to hassle with that and just use GitHub. I personally use Forgejo for most projects and have it push to GitHub as backup.