I am looking for recommendations for an open source self-hosted version control system source code hosting service. I found a few, but I can’t decide on which one to pick:
If there’s a better one than the ones I’ve listed here, I’d love to hear about it!
I care primarily about privacy and security, if that makes any difference.
You’re missing GitLab. I’d be looking at GitLab or Forgejo.
But you might not need this. When you access a private Git repository, you’re normally connecting over SSH and authenticating using SSH keys. By default, if you have Git installed on a server you can SSH to and you have a Git repository on that server in a location you can access, you can use that server as a Git remote. You only really want one these services if you want the CI pipelines or collaboration tools.
I feel like you made it sound a bit backwards :)
There’s nothing to install on a “git server”, git doesn’t have a server component. You can point your git client to a remote place where it can store its files using SSH. But you don’t install anything on the server for this.
Which is why self hosting a git remote is super easy. All you need is a server with ssh and a little bit of storage.
If you just want to sync code between different computers and have a backup, that’s all you need.
Having a web UI is useful even if you’re not using the extra tools. Not mandatory of course, but nice.
This is not true. There are lots of places where ssh/vpn is blocked by a firewall while https usually is allowed. So if you want to access/push code while travelling it might be really helpful to have https access to the repo. That was the only reason for me to set up gitlab years ago.