Installation with Docker (rootless)

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.

The rootless image uses Gitea internal SSH to provide Git protocol and doesn’t support OpenSSH.

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-rootless image as a service. Since there is no database available, one can be initialized using SQLite3.

Create a directory for data and config:

mkdir -p gitea/{data,config}
cd gitea
touch docker-compose.yml

Then paste the following content into a file named docker-compose.yml:

version: "2"

services:
  server:
    image: docker.gitea.com/gitea:1.24.7-rootless
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./data:/var/lib/gitea
      - ./config:/etc/gitea
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
      - "2222:2222"

Note that the volume should be owned by the user/group with the UID/GID specified in the config file. By default Gitea in docker will use uid:1000 gid:1000. If needed you can set ownership on those folders with the command:

sudo chown 1000:1000 config/ data/

If you don’t give the volume correct permissions, the container may not start.

For a stable release you could use :latest-rootless, :1-rootless or specify a certain release like :1.24.7-rootless, but if you’d like to use the latest development version then :nightly-rootless would be an appropriate tag. If you’d like to run the latest commit from a release branch you can use the :1.x-nightly-rootless tag, where x is the minor version of Gitea. (e.g. :1.16-nightly-rootless)

Custom port

To bind the integrated ssh 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: "2"

services:
  server:
    image: docker.gitea.com/gitea:1.24.7-rootless
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./data:/var/lib/gitea
      - ./config:/etc/gitea
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
      - "2222:2222"
      - "80:3000"
      - "22:2222"

MySQL database

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

version: "2"

services:
  server:
    image: docker.gitea.com/gitea:1.24.7-rootless
    environment:
      - GITEA__database__DB_TYPE=mysql
      - GITEA__database__HOST=db:3306
      - GITEA__database__NAME=gitea
      - GITEA__database__USER=gitea
      - GITEA__database__PASSWD=gitea
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./data:/var/lib/gitea
      - ./config:/etc/gitea
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
      - "2222:2222"
    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
    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: "2"

services:
  server:
    image: docker.gitea.com/gitea:1.24.7-rootless
    environment:
      - GITEA__database__DB_TYPE=postgres
      - GITEA__database__HOST=db:5432
      - GITEA__database__NAME=gitea
      - GITEA__database__USER=gitea
      - GITEA__database__PASSWD=gitea
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./data:/var/lib/gitea
      - ./config:/etc/gitea
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
      - "2222:2222"
    depends_on:
      - db

  db:
    image: docker.io/library/postgres:14
    restart: always
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_USER=gitea
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=gitea
      - POSTGRES_DB=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: "2"

volumes:
  gitea-data:
    driver: local
  gitea-config:
    driver: local

services:
  server:
    image: docker.gitea.com/gitea:1.24.7-rootless
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./data:/var/lib/gitea
      - gitea-data:/var/lib/gitea
      - ./config:/etc/gitea
      - gitea-config:/etc/gitea
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
      - "2222:2222"

MySQL or PostgreSQL containers will need to be created separately.

Custom user

You can choose to use a custom user (following –user flag definition https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/run/#user). As an example to clone the host user git definition use the command id -u git and add it to docker-compose.yml file: Please make sure that the mounted folders are writable by the user.

version: "2"

services:
  server:
    image: docker.gitea.com/gitea:1.24.7-rootless
    restart: always
    user: 1001
    volumes:
      - ./data:/var/lib/gitea
      - ./config:/etc/gitea
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
      - "2222:2222"

Startup

注意

From July 2023 Compose V1 stopped receiving updates. It’s also no longer available in new releases of Docker Desktop.

Compose V2 is included with all currently supported versions of Docker Desktop. Please use V2 to do below operations.

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.

注意

If using a non-3000 port on http, change app.ini to match LOCAL_ROOT_URL = http://localhost:3000/.

Install

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.

Customization

Customization files described here should be placed in /var/lib/gitea/custom 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/_/var_lib_gitea. The configuration file will be saved at /etc/gitea/app.ini after the installation.

Upgrading

警告

:exclamation::exclamation: Make sure you have volumed data to somewhere outside Docker container :exclamation::exclamation:

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

Upgrading from standard image

• Backup your setup
• Change volume mountpoint from /data to /var/lib/gitea
• If you used a custom app.ini move it to a new volume mounted to /etc/gitea
• Rename folder (inside volume) gitea to custom
• Edit app.ini if needed
  • Set START_SSH_SERVER = true
• Use image docker.gitea.com/gitea:1.24.7-rootless

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 a 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=${GITEA__mailer__FROM:?GITEA__mailer__FROM not set}
      - GITEA__mailer__PROTOCOL=smtp
      - GITEA__mailer__HOST=${GITEA__mailer__HOST:?GITEA__mailer__HOST not set}
      - GITEA__mailer__IS_TLS_ENABLED=true
      - GITEA__mailer__USER=${GITEA__mailer__USER:-apikey}
      - GITEA__mailer__PASSWD="""${GITEA__mailer__PASSWD:?GITEA__mailer__PASSWD not set}"""

To set required TOKEN and SECRET values, consider using Gitea’s built-in generate utility functions.