Forgejo is a free, self-hosted Git forge and Gitea fork governed by the non-profit Codeberg e.V. See its features, licensing, federation roadmap, and rivals.
Researched and fact-checked by Bartu Cavusoglu · Updated July 18, 2026
Forgejo is a self-hosted Git forge, forked from Gitea in October 2022 after Gitea's trademark and domain were transferred to a new for-profit company without community consultation. Forgejo is governed under Codeberg e.V., a German non-profit that also runs the Codeberg.org community Git hosting platform.
It began as a 'soft fork' that tracked upstream Gitea changes, then became a full 'hard fork' in February 2024, diverging permanently after Gitea's v1.21 release. In August 2024 the project moved its overall license from MIT to the GNU GPL.
Forgejo ships as a lightweight single static binary that runs on as little as 512MB of RAM, and includes pull requests, issue tracking, a wiki, a container registry, a package registry, Git LFS, and SSH access.
Forgejo Actions provides GitHub-Actions-compatible CI/CD with self-hosted runners, and the project is actively building ActivityPub-based federation (ForgeFed) toward the long-term goal of interconnected, decentralized forge instances, with federated repository stars already shipped as a first step.
Forgejo is free and open source (GPL-licensed, with inherited Gitea code remaining MIT-licensed) with no first-party commercial hosted tier from the project or Codeberg e.V.
Organizations self-host Forgejo on their own infrastructure at no licensing cost, though third-party providers offer paid managed Forgejo hosting, and Codeberg.org itself offers free, donation-funded public hosting.
Forgejo was forked from Gitea in October 2022 after the Gitea trademark and domain were transferred to a new for-profit company, Gitea Limited, without community consultation. When contributors' request to place the trademarks under community management was rejected, they forked the project as Forgejo under the non-profit Codeberg e.V.
Yes. Forgejo is free and open source (GPL-licensed) to self-host, with no first-party commercial hosted tier from the project itself. Third-party providers offer paid managed hosting, and Codeberg.org provides free, donation-funded public hosting.
Forgejo started as a soft fork of Gitea that tracked upstream changes, but became a full hard fork in February 2024, diverging permanently after Gitea v1.21. Forgejo is also governed by the non-profit Codeberg e.V. rather than the for-profit Gitea Limited, and moved its overall license from MIT to GPL in August 2024.
Yes. Forgejo Actions runs workflows written in GitHub Actions YAML syntax with self-hosted runners, and as of v15.0 supports OpenID Connect tokens for secure, short-lived authentication between workflows and external systems.
ForgeFed is an ActivityPub-based federation protocol designed for software forges. Forgejo is actively building on it, with federated repository stars across separate Forgejo instances already shipped, and fuller federation of pull requests, issues, and identities planned for the future.
Forgejo ships as a single static binary and is documented to run comfortably on as little as 512MB of RAM, making it practical to self-host on inexpensive VPS infrastructure.