I am experimenting with using forgejo instead of GitHub for my personal projects. So far I like it, however I would like to make it available to the outside world at some point.
I was wondering what kind of traps I should avoid. The following things come to mind so far:
- Forgejo Actions seem like a massive potential security risk, however I do not intend to enable sign up for other
- OpenID appears to be a thing for forgejo, I do not know how it works and it seems like it would allow access to my instance even with registering disabled
- I would put the instance behind a nginx as reverse proxy, but how do you keep bot traffic to a minimum? Anubis?
I feel like there are a ton of things I have not thought of, which is why I am holding off on making anything available without a VPN so far.
I would strongly recommend against publicly exposing it. It will get hammered by bots continuously.
Instead, I would move public repos to Codeberg
Lots of good answers already. Just want to add.
Block IP from every country that doesn’t have your users in it. That will go a long way.
- oauth, and control sign ups via there. Don’t let people sign up via forgejo itself.
- anubis, yeah. Or similar.
- forgejo actions is an optional component… and forgejo users can bring their own actions server. Of course, it’s a risk to them since the server owner could execute code in actions. But yeah.
I definitely want to use forgejo actions, but I am mainly worried about random people being able to execute any code on them. Preferably only approved users can do that.
The way forgejo actions works, is that it is not a universal thing for every repo. Each repo, can have it’s own forgejo actions instance connected to it, running stuff.
The big benefit of that, is that you can make users bring their own actions servers, and not bother to deploy your own.
I run it in a rootless Podman container using Quadlets. Instead of opening the server’s ssh port, I only port-forward the container’s ssh port (e.g. 22 -> 2222). I have sign-ups enabled, since I want people to be able to contribute (or just create issues). But I have configured the server so that nobody can create a repository. They can still fork my repos and send a pull request.
I have yet to experiment with Actions. I assume the safest option would be to only enable it for my own commits, but I am not sure.
Do you need to host it yourself? Codeberg is free, and they handle these concerns for you.
But yes, you will need to secure it against hackers and scrapers. Keep user permissions to a minimum, if you allow people to create accounts at all. And run it in a dmz network, so that in case it’s compromised they can’t access the rest of your LAN.
I don’t need to, but I want to :D
I have thought about doing this with gitlab. honestly, I was just going to stand up a free instance on AWS and have my local repos sync to the public one.
no problems then.
