I'd recommend Forgejo rather than Gitea for a new install these days. It's a Gitea fork that was soft-forked (still compatible) until recently but is now moving to a hard fork model and has significantly more development momentum and a bigger community behind it. Still basically the same thing for most purposes, but I think Forgejo's approach to actions/runners makes way more sense and they've started adding features like ActivityPub federation that I think will put them in a good position in the future.

Forgejo has auto mirroring built in, it'll periodically sync the repos you add. The disadvantage is you have to add them manually. Initially I wanted a list of my started github repos synced to my forgejo instance and just added them one by one. A simple cron job might be enough to do that, but last time I checked github didn't have an API for fetching started repositories.

Quick little script I run as a cron job. Script was authored by Claude Code. I’m not home right now but any llm can probably get you 95% of the way there. Remind me in a couple days if you don’t get something. Sorry I’m traveling right now

Edit: some details… it uses the gitea api repos/migrate endpoint after getting a list of repos from the github api. Super simple.

You could prob do in real-time with some webhooks but I don’t need anything like that. I just need a one time migration.

Also, mine doesn’t keep in sync with the upstream yet. I need another process to do that.