I’m developing an application with embedded git support using libgit2. For testing purposes I require a git server. At first, I decided to have a look at gitlab. I followed the instructions from the ArchLinux wiki to install gitlab on my Odroid-U3 running ArchLinuxARM.

At first, I encountered some database related errors regarding an index being too big.

ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid: Mysql2::Error: Specified key was too long; max key length is 767 bytes: CREATE INDEX index_audit_events_on_entity_id_and_entity_type USING btree ON audit_events (entity_id, entity_type)

I was able to resolve this error by changing the database encoding, in /etc/webapps/gitlab/database.yml from utf8_mb4 to utf8. However, it turned out gitlab is a HEAVY application. Way too heavy to run on a simple ARM board, even though it has 4 cores. Damn…. gitlab is a heavy application. Taking minutes to serve the login page, only half. What kind of server do you need to run gitlab?

So I decided to look for a lighter alternative. There I found gitea. They provide pre-compiled binaries for ARM, so I figured it must be light enough to run on an ARM based system. And so it does. It runs as a charm.

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