Journal > Migrating from GitHub to SourceHut
Posted 2024-11-05 under #meta
I’ve moved this site’s repository from GitHub to SourceHut, an alternative, open-source Git host. I thought I’d take a few minutes to explain the why and the how.
I’ve been on GitHub since 2008, and I still use it every day as part of my job. I’ve no major complaints – I’m still worlds happier using it than when I’m forced to use Jira or similar. Still, something has shifted in the last 16 years.
I get regular emails from their salespeople trying to upsell us on more expensive enterprise plans; that’s how it goes in a capitalist society, but I prefer my tech a little scrappier. I’m not crazy about Git – open-source, decentralized technology – becoming largely synonymous with a closed-source, centralized platform owned by a three-trillion dollar company, nor about my work and personal coding activity being all mixed up together. Furthermore, the way they’ve used open-source code to train up their LLM (Copilot) that they then sell back to developers doesn’t sit right with me.
I learned about SourceHut from Tim Hårek and have been following along for a few years. A thread on Mastodon (alas, lost in the void) about Copilot finally motivated me to sign up. I happily paid $20 to support the effort as well as to get access to SourceHut Builds, their GitHub Actions equivalent (this post about why they require a paid account to use CI is a gem).
After a few evenings of tinkering, I’ve got this site (as well as my Markdown link renumbering tool) moved over. I’m pretty anti-bikeshedding at work, but this is my place to be exactly as fussy as my heart desires.
Setting up SourceHut Builds
Adding a new remote is as simple as
git remote rename origin github
git remote add origin [email protected]:~dce/davideisinger.com
git push origin main
But switching from GitHub Actions to SourceHut Builds took some doing. A few things to note:
- There’s no analog to GitHub’s Actions Marketplace. You’ve got what’s available via the OS package manager, and beyond that, you’ll need to install things by hand. Here’s how I install Bun, for example.
&doesn’t work for starting background tasks. Building this site requires starting a local image server and then calling it from Hugo. On GitHub, I could start the server withbundle exec ruby dither.rb &, but SourceHut seems to strip off the&, starting the process in the foreground and thus hanging the build. Switching over torackupwith the--daemonizeoption works fine.
- Secrets go in files, not environment variables. If you need a secret as an environment variable, do something like this. Be sure to disable logging before you do this – it’s verbose in surprising ways (see “Keeping your secrets a secret” in the docs).
- Add stuff to
~/.buildenv(which runs before every step) to reduce duplication. See docs and examples for this site and mdrenum.