2 Supported Forges and Hosts

Currently Forge supports two forges and three more forges partially. Additionally it supports four semi-forges. Support for more forges and semi-forges can and will be added.

Both forges and semi-forges provide web interfaces for Git repositories. Forges additionally support pull-requests and issues and make those and other information available using an API.

When a forge is only partially supported, then that means that only the functionality that does not require the API is implemented, or in other words, that the forge is only supported as a semi-forge.

A host is a particular instance of a forge. For example the hosts https://gitlab.com and https://salsa.debian.org are both instances of the Gitlab forge. Forge supports some well known hosts out of the box and additional hosts can easily be supported by adding entries to the option forge-alist.

For more details about the caveats mentioned below (and some others) also see Getting Started.

2.1 Supported Forges

• Github

  Forge’s support for Github can be considered the "reference implementation". Support for other forges can lag behind a bit.

  Github Caveats

  • Forge uses the Github GraphQl API when possible but has to fall back to use the REST API in many cases because the former is still rather incomplete.
  • Forge depends on the updated_at field being updated when appropriate. For Github pull-requests at least, that is not always done.

  Github Hosts

  • https://github.com
• Gitlab

  Gitlab Caveats

  • Forge cannot use Ghub’s setup wizard to create the API token because the Gitlab API does not support doing that.
  • Forge cannot provide notifications because the Gitlab API does not expose those.

  Gitlab Hosts

  • https://gitlab.com
  • https://salsa.debian.org

2.2 Partially Supported Forges

• Gitea https://gitea.io/en-us

  This is the next forge whose API will to be supported.

  Gitea Hosts

  • https://teahub.io Note that this host is in pre-alpha and that it is not clear whether the operators are trustworthy. I have only added this to forge-alist because I couldn’t find any other more trustworthy and persistent public instances but needed something for testing purposes. The Gitea maintainers plan to create their own instance, see https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029. Once that is available, I will probably remove teahub.io again.
• Gogs https://gogs.io

  Once Gitea is supported it should be fairly simple to support Gogs too, because the former is a fork of the latter and the APIs seem to still be very similar.

  Gogs Hosts

  • https://code.orgmode.org
• Bitbucket

  I don’t plan to support Bitbucket’s API any time soon, and it gets less likely that I will every do it every time I look at it.

  Bitbucket Caveats

  • The API documentation is poor and initial tests indicated that the implementation is buggy.
  • Atlassian’s offering contains two very distinct implementations that are both called "Bitbucket". Forge only supports the implementation whose only instance is available at https://bitbucket.org, because I only have access to that.
  • Unlike all other forges, Bitbucket does not expose pull-requests as references in the upstream repository. For that reason Forge actually treats it as a semi-forge, not as forge whose API is not supported yet. This means that you cannot checkout pull-requests locally. There is little hope that this will ever get fixed; the respective issue was opened six years ago and there has been no progress since: https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/5814.

  Bitbucket Hosts

  • https://bitbucket.org

2.3 Supported Semi-Forges

• Gitweb https://git-scm.com/docs/gitweb

  Gitweb Caveats

  • I could find only one public installation (https://git.savannah.gnu.org), which gives users the choice between Gitweb and Cgit. The latter seems more popular (not just on this site).
• Cgit https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about

  Cgit Caveats

  • Different sites use different URL schemata and some of the bigger sites use a fork. For this reason Forge has to provide several classes to support different variations of Cgit and you have to look at their definitions to figure out which on is the correct one for a particular installation.

  Cgit Hosts

  • https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit
  • https://git.kernel.org
  • https://repo.or.cz
• Stgit https://codemadness.org/git/stagit/file/README.html

  Stgit Caveats

  • Stgit cannot show logs for branches beside "master". For that reason Forge takes users to a page listing the branches when they request a log a particular branch (even for "master" whose log is just one click away from there).

  Stgit Hosts

  • https://git.suckless.org
• Stht https://meta.sr.ht

  Stht Caveats

  • Stht cannot show logs for branches beside "master". For that reason Forge takes users to a page listing the branches when they request a log a particular branch (even for "master" whose log is just one click away from there).

  Stht Hosts

  • https://git.sr.ht