I continue to find that my Synology NAS arrays are the most versatile devices in my home lab. I run many small “helper” services on my arrays through the use of the Docker service built into the 6.x and 7.x releases of the Synology DSM. What are these helper services that I am running? Things like “Grafana”, “Prometheus”, “Minio” and the topic for discussion today “Gitea”.

What is Gitea? From their website it is “Gitea is a community managed lightweight code hosting solution written in Go.” You can think of Gitea as a self hosted GitHub or GitLab service. Gitea is written in Go, and it can run on Windows, macOS, and Linux on both x86 and ARM platforms making it a very versatile application. It can also run without the need for an external database server such as MySQL or Postgres by leveraging SQLite. If you are planning to deploy a large Git hosting solution, you should probably look to use one of these more versatile database servers, but for a small home lab, using the SQLite will work just fine.

In August of this year, there was a bunch of panic about GitHub being compromised, and 35K repos having malicious code in them. Further investigation clarified that it was Github Repos that were set up to do a “phishing” type attack, by creating repositories that were improperly named or Typosquatting. That being said it has led to further discussion and attention around Code Supply Chain, and ensuring that code contributions, libraries and releases are validated before use. One such way to do this is by signing code commits.