This blog post has been updated with additional details and was originally published on 03-14-2022.

Adding storage to an OpenShift cluster can greatly increase the types of workloads you can run, including workloads such as OpenShift Virtualization, or databases such as MongoDB and PostgreSQL. Persistent volumes can be supplied in many different ways within OpenShift including using LocalVolumes, or OpenShift Data Foundation, or provided by an underlying Cloud Provider such as the vSphere provider. Storage providers for external storage arrays such as Pure CSI Driver, Dell, Infinidat CSI Driver and Synology CSI Driver also exist. While I do not have the a Pure Storage Array or an Infinibox in my home lab, I do have a Synology array, that supports iSCSI and this will be the focus of the blog. The Synology CSI driver supports the creation of ReadWriteOnce (RWO) persistent file volumes along with ReadWriteMany (RWX) persistent block volumes as well as the creation of snapshots on both these volume types.

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.