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Codeberg

A public, non-profit Git forge for free and open-source projects, run on Forgejo by Codeberg e.V., a member-owned association in Berlin: repositories, issues, pull requests, CI, static pages and translations without a company behind them.

What it is
Version control
Used for
CI/CD pipelines,Issue tracking
Type
Commercial product
Made by
Codeberg e.V.
Facts checked
24 October 2026
Website

What it is

Codeberg.org is a hosted forge in the same role as github.com: you create an account, push repositories over SSH or HTTPS, and work with issues, pull requests, wikis, releases and package registries in the browser. The software is Forgejo, the Gitea fork that Codeberg itself started and still hosts, so everything on Forgejo’s page applies, including its API and its package formats. What Codeberg adds is the operator: Codeberg e.V., a registered non-profit association in Berlin. Using the site is free and needs no membership, but members vote in the general assembly and elect the presidium and board, and the service is paid for by donations and membership fees.

Around the forge it runs a few more free services. Codeberg Pages publishes static sites from a pages branch or repository at username.codeberg.page or a custom domain; it recently moved to a new server, git-pages, and the old v2 server is closed to new users. CI comes in two forms: a Woodpecker CI instance at ci.codeberg.org, where access is granted by hand after a request form and jobs build only for linux/amd64, and hosted Forgejo Actions runners, described as limited and in open alpha; projects can also attach their own Woodpecker agents or Forgejo runners. Codeberg Translate, at translate.codeberg.org, is a Weblate instance for localizing projects.

The terms of use shape what belongs there. Public repositories must carry a free licence (Creative Commons licences with NC or ND terms don’t count), private repositories are meant for what free-software projects need, such as secrets or unpublished work, and “explicitly not as a personal cloud or media storage”. Since July 2026 the terms also exclude projects that mostly consist of code written by generative AI tools, and cryptocurrency projects. By November 2025 it hosted more than 300,000 repositories for over 200,000 accounts, and projects such as the Zig compiler had moved their development there from GitHub.

Why teams pick it

  • No company to be sold: a non-profit whose members own and steer it, with infrastructure in the EU and a stated policy of avoiding proprietary external services
  • Free for free software, with the usual forge features plus CI, static pages and a translation platform on the same account
  • Runs Forgejo, so the API, workflows and data are the same as on any self-hosted Forgejo instance, and a project can move to its own Forgejo instance running the same software
  • Some well-known projects, including Zig and Forgejo itself, develop there, so contributors increasingly already have accounts

Watch out for

  • Only for free and open content: proprietary code, private storage, AI-generated projects and cryptocurrency projects are against the terms
  • Volunteer-scale capacity: Woodpecker access is granted by request and “might break at any time”, hosted Forgejo Actions is an alpha, and only linux/amd64 builds are offered
  • Availability has suffered from attacks: in February 2025 spam floods and a volumetric denial-of-service attack caused repeated connection problems
  • Fewer users and integrations than GitHub, and Forgejo Actions is similar to GitHub Actions but not compatible with it

Alternatives

What all version control have in common →Compare side by side →
GitHubCommercialThe largest Git host: repositories, pull requests, code review, issues and packages in one web service, owned by Microsoft since 2018 and used by more than 180 million developers.GitLabCommercialA Git forge sold as one application for the whole software lifecycle, from issues and merge requests to built-in CI/CD, packages and security scanning, that you can use on GitLab.com or run yourself.BitbucketCommercialAtlassian’s Git host, built to sit next to Jira: pull requests, code review and Bitbucket Pipelines CI, as the Bitbucket Cloud service or the self-managed Bitbucket Data Center.GiteaOpen sourceA lightweight, self-hosted Git forge in one Go program: repositories, pull requests, issues, a package registry and GitHub Actions-style CI, under the MIT license.ForgejoOpen sourceA self-hosted Git forge, like a small GitHub you run yourself: repositories, pull requests, issues, a package registry and built-in CI in one Go program, developed by a community under the non-profit Codeberg e.V. as a hard fork of Gitea.RadicleOpen sourceA peer-to-peer code forge built on Git: every user runs a node that stores and shares repositories, and issues, patches and reviews travel inside the repository as signed Git objects, with no central server.

How it fits with other technologies

See it in a real stack

No architecture uses Codeberg yet. Drop it into the playground and wire it up yourself.Open playground →
Where it came from2018–2026

Codeberg started as a hosted forge that no company could buy. Codeberg e.V. was founded in Berlin in September 2018 with seven founding members, and Codeberg.org, first called TeaHub, launched on January 1, 2019, running Gitea. Its bylaws give the reason: free software written by volunteers had ended up on “proprietary online services of commercial companies, which are mostly operating under US law”, and the association exists to run a free, non-profit platform and to avoid “dependencies on external and proprietary services”.

In October 2022 Gitea’s domains and trademark moved to a new company, Gitea Ltd. Codeberg, which had maintained its own patched Gitea, answered by launching Forgejo on December 15, 2022 as a community fork under its umbrella, and switched Codeberg.org to it from version 1.18.0. Forgejo stopped following Gitea in February 2024 and is still developed on Codeberg.

Growth brought load and hostility. In February 2025 a campaign flooded projects with abusive issues and email notifications and then a volumetric denial-of-service attack clogged the association’s connection. From late 2025 several well-known projects moved there from GitHub, among them Zig, whose November 26 announcement cited GitHub’s declining engineering and its push of AI features, and by November 2025 the site passed 300,000 repositories. In July 2026 Codeberg amended the terms of use to exclude vibe-coded and cryptocurrency projects.

Why it’s built this way

A member-owned association instead of a company
The founders wanted a platform for free software that couldn’t be sold or redirected by owners; as an e.V., members elect the leadership and changes to the rules go to the general assembly.
Host in the EU
Members worried that a project hosted in the United States could be taken down through bad-faith DMCA copyright claims, so the association and its infrastructure are in Germany.
Fork the forge software rather than depend on it
When Gitea passed to a for-profit company, Codeberg said it needed “a Free Software codebase maintained by trustworthy people”, and started Forgejo under its own non-profit roof.
Free software only
The service is funded by donations to promote free software and free content, so the terms require free licences for public repositories and limit private ones to what such projects need.

Timeline

  1. 2018

    Codeberg e.V. founded in Berlin with seven founding members (September)

  2. 2019

    Codeberg.org launches (January 1), running Gitea

  3. 2022

    Codeberg launches Forgejo and switches to it with version 1.18.0 (December 15)

  4. 2024

    Forgejo becomes a hard fork and stops syncing with Gitea (February)

  5. 2025

    Spam and DoS attacks (February); Zig moves to Codeberg (November 26); over 300,000 repositories

  6. 2026

    Terms of use exclude AI-generated and cryptocurrency projects (July)

Sources7 · facts checked 24 October 2026

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