Best self-hosted version control + CI/CD solution for small team?

The title says it all. I am looking for a small self-hosted code hosting and CI/CD solution and just wonder what your experience with the different solutions are.

The company will not allow any cloud interaction so must be self-hosted on a shared server but I am open for any suggestions.

The features I am after are:

  • Git hosting

  • Code review

  • CI tasks before committing to trunk

  • Maybe issues and wiki but not essential

  • BONUS: Something where I can do everything from the command-line, especially pull requests and reviews and what not. I know this doesn’t seem to be directly supported in the Github/gitlab/gitea sort of solution but perhaps there are others out there which are better?

  • Gitlab - I don’t like it because it uses way too many resources, too many 3rd party components and it is painfully slow

  • Gogs/Gitea - Lightweight and easy to setup but are they any good?

  • phabricator - Is it still a thing?

  • Others?

And what self-hosted CI/CD are there?

  • jenkins - we are currently using this for some things. I am not a huge fan
  • drone.io - Managed to get it going with gitea. Is lightweight but is it any good?
  • TeamCity
  • AppVeyor
  • Others?
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Self-hosting git repos is pretty easy, there are good instructions in the Git book: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-Getting-Git-on-a-Server (excellent book btw, definitely worth a read). There is also a basic web visualiser that comes with Git itself, GitWeb: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-GitWeb

I’ve only ever used it for deployment purposes though (so push / pull etc) hence didn’t bother with a web visualiser. I’m not sure whether it would be suitable for your exact requirements but it would definitely be worth reading through some of those chapters.

I think @NobbZ has worked with a self-hosted set-up with GitLab - hopefully he’ll see this and maybe add some thoughts…

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Thanks @AstonJ.

We are currently running bare git repos, some ad-hoc git hooks and an old jenkins server. I am not happy with this and want to explore alternatives and a more integrated solution.

The hard thing is coming up with a solution that works for the entire team. There are some that are beginner git users and not familiar with github workflows.

We have a pretty “subversion” workflow going on at the moment. Everyone has commit rights to trunk and quite often commits break the build or tests (but in my opinion then it is too late). Here I want to add some sort of code review and a CI build step that runs the builds and tests before accepting the merge to trunk.

I know this can be setup with just git and other 3rd party software but I think a more prescriptive solution might be in order. Something that gives a little bit more to lean on.

Would be interesting to hear about GitLab but as an old sys-op I have lots of prejudice against it, so it is an uphill battle :smiley:

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I use Concourse as it’s pretty simple and bare, it just runs docker instances fresh each time, you build up how everything should go, etc… It’s had occasional bugs but I think they are mostly fixed now, but I find it pleasant to use.

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Great! I will have a look at concourse. I’ve seen it mentioned before, but running docker instances fresh is probably where I want to go and something that drone.io also does.

What source control system are you using and is that integrated into concourse?

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Concourse doesn’t touch VCS, that’s what the docker runners are for. However I use git, and it integrates either by having concourse poll or you can send a push message from your git to have it trigger (or both). It’s extremely configurable in stuff like this (perhaps too much, but it’s really nice once set up).

If you want to give it a try feel free to ask if you need help with anything. I’ve not tried drone.io but I’ve heard good things about it too.

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