Gitea is a self-hosted Git service written in Go — a single binary (plus a database) that gives you repository hosting, pull requests, issues, a wiki, releases, package registries, and a web UI. It started as a fork of Gogs in 2016 and has since become the dominant lightweight self-hosted alternative to GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket.
The appeal is resource footprint and operational simplicity. Gitea runs comfortably on a Raspberry Pi, boots in seconds, and stores data in SQLite, MySQL, Postgres, or TiDB with repositories on a local or NFS filesystem (or S3-compatible object storage via newer storage drivers). It speaks SSH and HTTPS for Git, supports LFS, and has a built-in package registry that speaks the protocols for npm, Maven, NuGet, PyPI, Docker/OCI, Helm, Composer, Conan, Cargo, and others. Gitea Actions, introduced in 1.19, implements a GitHub Actions–compatible runner protocol so you can run existing .github/workflows YAML against Gitea.
In 2022, a commercial entity (Gitea Ltd) was formed around the project, which caused a governance split and a community fork called Forgejo — hosted by Codeberg. Both are still active; Gitea continues on its roadmap including a federation effort (ForgeFed) and an enterprise edition, while Forgejo focuses on staying copyleft and community-governed. If you want self-hosted Git without GitLab’s weight, one of the two is almost always the answer.