Installation with Docker

Gitea provides automatically updated Docker images within its Docker Hub organization. It is possible to always use the latest stable tag or to use another service that handles updating Docker images.

This reference setup guides users through the setup based on docker-compose, but the installation of docker-compose is out of scope of this documentation. To install docker-compose itself, follow the official install instructions.

Basics​

The most simple setup just creates a volume and a network and starts the docker.gitea.com/gitea:latest image as a service. Since there is no database available, one can be initialized using SQLite3. Create a directory like gitea and paste the following content into a file named docker-compose.yml. Note that the volume should be owned by the user/group with the UID/GID specified in the config file. If you don't give the volume correct permissions, the container may not start. For a stable release you can use :latest, :1 or specify a certain release like :1.25.4, but if you'd like to use the latest development version of Gitea then you could use the :nightly tag. If you'd like to run the latest commit from a release branch you can use the :1.x-nightly tag, where x is the minor version of Gitea. (e.g. :1.16-nightly)

version: "3"

networks:
  gitea:
    external: false

services:
  server:
    image: docker.gitea.com/gitea:1.25.4
    container_name: gitea
    environment:
      - USER_UID=1000
      - USER_GID=1000
    restart: always
    networks:
      - gitea
    volumes:
      - ./gitea:/data
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
      - "222:22"

Ports​

To bind the integrated OpenSSH daemon and the webserver on a different port, adjust the port section. It's common to just change the host port and keep the ports within the container like they are.

version: "3"

networks:
  gitea:
    external: false

services:
  server:
    image: docker.gitea.com/gitea:1.25.4
    container_name: gitea
    environment:
      - USER_UID=1000
      - USER_GID=1000
    restart: always
    networks:
      - gitea
    volumes:
      - ./gitea:/data
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    ports:
-     - "3000:3000"
-     - "222:22"
+     - "8080:3000"
+     - "2221:22"

Databases​

MySQL database​

To start Gitea in combination with a MySQL database, apply these changes to the docker-compose.yml file created above.

version: "3"

networks:
  gitea:
    external: false

services:
  server:
    image: docker.gitea.com/gitea:1.25.4
    container_name: gitea
    environment:
      - USER_UID=1000
      - USER_GID=1000
+      - GITEA__database__DB_TYPE=mysql
+      - GITEA__database__HOST=db:3306
+      - GITEA__database__NAME=gitea
+      - GITEA__database__USER=gitea
+      - GITEA__database__PASSWD=gitea
    restart: always
    networks:
      - gitea
    volumes:
      - ./gitea:/data
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
      - "222:22"
+    depends_on:
+      - db
+
+  db:
+    image: docker.io/library/mysql:8
+    restart: always
+    environment:
+      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=gitea
+      - MYSQL_USER=gitea
+      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=gitea
+      - MYSQL_DATABASE=gitea
+    networks:
+      - gitea
+    volumes:
+      - ./mysql:/var/lib/mysql

PostgreSQL database​

To start Gitea in combination with a PostgreSQL database, apply these changes to the docker-compose.yml file created above.

version: "3"

networks:
  gitea:
    external: false

services:
  server:
    image: docker.gitea.com/gitea:1.25.4
    container_name: gitea
    environment:
      - USER_UID=1000
      - USER_GID=1000
+      - GITEA__database__DB_TYPE=postgres
+      - GITEA__database__HOST=db:5432
+      - GITEA__database__NAME=gitea
+      - GITEA__database__USER=gitea
+      - GITEA__database__PASSWD=gitea
    restart: always
    networks:
      - gitea
    volumes:
      - ./gitea:/data
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
      - "222:22"
+    depends_on:
+      - db
+
+  db:
+    image: docker.io/library/postgres:14
+    restart: always
+    environment:
+      - POSTGRES_USER=gitea
+      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=gitea
+      - POSTGRES_DB=gitea
+    networks:
+      - gitea
+    volumes:
+      - ./postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data

Named volumes​

To use named volumes instead of host volumes, define and use the named volume within the docker-compose.yml configuration. This change will automatically create the required volume. You don't need to worry about permissions with named volumes; Docker will deal with that automatically.

version: "3"

networks:
  gitea:
    external: false

+volumes:
+  gitea:
+    driver: local
+
services:
  server:
    image: docker.gitea.com/gitea:1.25.4
    container_name: gitea
    restart: always
    networks:
      - gitea
    volumes:
-      - ./gitea:/data
+      - gitea:/data
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
      - "222:22"

MySQL or PostgreSQL containers will need to be created separately.

Startup​

To start this setup based on docker-compose, execute docker-compose up -d, to launch Gitea in the background. Using docker-compose ps will show if Gitea started properly. Logs can be viewed with docker-compose logs.

To shut down the setup, execute docker-compose down. This will stop and kill the containers. The volumes will still exist.

Installation​

After starting the Docker setup via docker-compose, Gitea should be available using a favorite browser to finalize the installation. Visit http://server-ip:3000 and follow the installation wizard. If the database was started with the docker-compose setup as documented above, please note that db must be used as the database hostname.

Configure the user inside Gitea using environment variables​

• USER: git: The username of the user that runs Gitea within the container.
• USER_UID: 1000: The UID (Unix user ID) of the user that runs Gitea within the container. Match this to the UID of the owner of the /data volume if using host volumes (this is not necessary with named volumes).
• USER_GID: 1000: The GID (Unix group ID) of the user that runs Gitea within the container. Match this to the GID of the owner of the /data volume if using host volumes (this is not necessary with named volumes).

Customization​

Customization files described here should be placed in /data/gitea directory. If using host volumes, it's quite easy to access these files; for named volumes, this is done through another container or by direct access at /var/lib/docker/volumes/gitea_gitea/_data. The configuration file will be saved at /data/gitea/conf/app.ini after the installation.

Example: Analogous to the non-docker-installation customization linked above, you can create a /public folder within /data/gitea and place your custom robots.txt there which will then be served normally.

Upgrading​

To upgrade your installation to the latest release:

# Edit `docker-compose.yml` to update the version, if you have one specified
# Pull new images
docker-compose pull
# Start a new container, automatically removes old one
docker-compose up -d

Managing Deployments With Environment Variables​

In addition to the environment variables above, any settings in app.ini can be set or overridden with an environment variable of the form: GITEA__SECTION_NAME__KEY_NAME. These settings are applied each time the docker container starts, and won't be passed into Gitea's sub-processes. Full information here.

These environment variables can be passed to the docker container in docker-compose.yml. The following example will enable an smtp mail server if the required env variables GITEA__mailer__FROM, GITEA__mailer__HOST, GITEA__mailer__PASSWD are set on the host or in a .env file in the same directory as docker-compose.yml.

The settings can be also set or overridden with the content of a file by defining an environment variable of the form: GITEA__section_name__KEY_NAME__FILE that points to a file.

...
services:
  server:
    environment:
      - GITEA__mailer__ENABLED=true
      - GITEA__mailer__FROM=${GITEA__mailer__FROM:?GITEA__mailer__FROM not set}
      - GITEA__mailer__PROTOCOL=smtps
      - GITEA__mailer__SMTP_ADDR=${GITEA__mailer__SMTP_ADDR:?GITEA__mailer__SMTP_ADDR not set}
      - GITEA__mailer__SMTP_PORT=${GITEA__mailer__SMTP_PORT:?GITEA__mailer__SMTP_PORT not set}
      - GITEA__mailer__USER=${GITEA__mailer__USER:-apikey}
      - GITEA__mailer__PASSWD="""${GITEA__mailer__PASSWD:?GITEA__mailer__PASSWD not set}"""

Gitea will generate new secrets/tokens for every new installation automatically and write them into the app.ini. If you want to set the secrets/tokens manually, you can use the following docker commands to use of Gitea's built-in generate utility functions. Do not lose/change your SECRET_KEY after the installation, otherwise the encrypted data can not be decrypted anymore.

The following commands will output a new SECRET_KEY and INTERNAL_TOKEN to stdout, which you can then place in your environment variables.

docker run -it --rm docker.gitea.com/gitea:1 gitea generate secret SECRET_KEY
docker run -it --rm docker.gitea.com/gitea:1 gitea generate secret INTERNAL_TOKEN

...
services:
  server:
    environment:
      - GITEA__security__SECRET_KEY=[value returned by generate secret SECRET_KEY]
      - GITEA__security__INTERNAL_TOKEN=[value returned by generate secret INTERNAL_TOKEN]

SSH with multiple IP addresses​

This assumes that the host machine has more than one reachable IP address: 192.168.1.1 (host) 192.168.1.2 (gitea) On the host machine, configure SSHD in /etc/ssh/sshd_config to listen on one IP address ListenAddress 192.168.1.1. In the compose file the SSH port forwarding then needs to be changed to "192.168.1.2:22:22". The port forwarding needs to be adjusted similarily for all other forwarded ports to avoid problems with DNS.