Forgejo vs GitHub vs gitlab

Posted Oct 9, 2025 22:48 UTC (Thu) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855)
In reply to: Forgejo vs GitHub vs gitlab by SLi
Parent article: Gccrs after libcore

> [code search] which apparntly gitlab does not have

Gitlab has code search, but you need to set up a whole elasticsearch cluster for it; not every project self-hosting Gitlab wants to do that.

Forgejo vs GitHub vs gitlab

Posted Oct 10, 2025 18:54 UTC (Fri) by SLi (subscriber, #53131) [Link] (3 responses)

Interesting. Perhaps then it's just the freedesktop gitlab instance where they haven't set up code search? Or (wouldn't be the first time) I just haven't figured out how to use gitlab—at times I find it quite unintuitive.

Looking at e.g. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/ , I see only a "search by filename" (even when signed in, if that makes a difference), which is... not what I mean by code search.

Forgejo vs GitHub vs gitlab

Posted Oct 11, 2025 11:48 UTC (Sat) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (2 responses)

> Perhaps then it's just the freedesktop gitlab instance where they haven't set up code search?

GNOME, too, has not set up a search cluster. Again: it's not something people self-hosting GitLab necessarily want to spend time babysitting in their infrastructure.

Forgejo vs GitHub vs gitlab

Posted Oct 11, 2025 12:43 UTC (Sat) by SLi (subscriber, #53131) [Link] (1 responses)

I can see that. It's just that as far as git web UIs go, I'm baffled because to me this is *the* central feature of a git web UI. I could imagine migrating a project from GitHub to a gitlab instance without search for ideological reasons, but I couldn't pretend it's it's not la downgrade like going from git to CVS.

Probably this is exacerbated by how I work on systems, not any single repository. A really common use case for me is to search a repository for a specific error message or function name. Having a project hosted on a searchless instance basically forces me to either rely on unofficial GitHub copies or to check out the repository locally, which is just a major hassle if the only thing you want is to understand the immediate condition that triggers some error message.

Forgejo vs GitHub vs gitlab

Posted Oct 12, 2025 1:17 UTC (Sun) by lanodan (subscriber, #169017) [Link]

When a local grep doesn't works I've been using https://codesearch.debian.net/ quite few times even though I barely use Debian myself.
And one of the things I really love about it is the ability to use a regex.