FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

This page contains some common questions and answers.

For more help resources, check all Support Options.

Difference between 1.x and 1.x.x downloads

Version 1.7.x will be used for this example.

NOTE: this example applies to Docker images as well!

On our downloads page you will see a 1.7 directory, as well as directories for 1.7.0, 1.7.1, 1.7.2, 1.7.3, 1.7.4, 1.7.5, and 1.7.6.

The 1.7 and 1.7.0 directories are not the same. The 1.7 directory is built on each merged commit to the release/v1.7 branch.

The 1.7.0 directory, however, is a build that was created when the v1.7.0 tag was created.

This means that 1.x downloads will change as commits are merged to their respective branch (think of it as a separate “main” branch for each release).

On the other hand, 1.x.x downloads should never change.

How to migrate from Gogs/GitHub/etc. to Gitea

To migrate from Gogs to Gitea:

To migrate from GitHub to Gitea, you can use Gitea’s built-in migration form.

In order to migrate items such as issues, pull requests, etc. you will need to input at least your username.

Example (requires login)

To migrate from GitLab to Gitea, you can use this non-affiliated tool:

https://github.com/loganinak/MigrateGitlabToGogs

Where does Gitea store what file

AppWorkPath
- The --work-path flag
- Else Environment variable GITEA_WORK_DIR
- Else a built-in value set at build time
- Else the directory that contains the Gitea binary
%(APP_DATA_PATH) (default for database, indexers, etc.)
- APP_DATA_PATH from app.ini
- Else AppWorkPath/data
CustomPath (custom templates)
- The --custom-path flag
- Else Environment variable GITEA_CUSTOM
- Else a built-in value set at build time
- Else AppWorkPath/custom
HomeDir
- Unix: Environment variable HOME
- Windows: Environment variable USERPROFILE, else environment variables HOMEDRIVE+HOMEPATH
RepoRootPath
- ROOT in the [repository] section of app.ini if absolute
- Else AppWorkPath/ROOT if ROOT in the [repository] section of app.ini if relative
- Default %(APP_DATA_PATH)/gitea-repositories
INI (config file)
- --config flag
- A possible built-in value set a build time
- Else CustomPath/conf/app.ini
SQLite Database
- PATH in database section of app.ini
- Else %(APP_DATA_PATH)/gitea.db

Not seeing a clone URL or the clone URL being incorrect

There are a few places that could make this show incorrectly.

If using a reverse proxy, make sure you have followed the correction directions in the reverse proxy guide
Make sure you have correctly set ROOT_URL in the server section of your app.ini

If certain clone options aren’t showing up (HTTP/S or SSH), the following options can be checked in your app.ini

DISABLE_HTTP_GIT: if set to true, there will be no HTTP/HTTPS link
DISABLE_SSH: if set to true, there will be no SSH link
SSH_EXPOSE_ANONYMOUS: if set to false, SSH links will be hidden for anonymous users

File upload fails with: 413 Request Entity Too Large

This error occurs when the reverse proxy limits the file upload size.

See the reverse proxy guide for a solution with nginx.

Custom Templates not loading or working incorrectly

Gitea’s custom templates must be added to the correct location or Gitea will not find and use them.

The correct path for the template(s) will be relative to the CustomPath

To find CustomPath, look for Custom File Root Path in Site Administration -> Configuration

If that doesn’t exist, you can try echo $GITEA_CUSTOM
If you are still unable to find a path, the default can be calculated above
Once you have figured out the correct custom path, you can refer to the customizing Gitea page to add your template to the correct location.

Does Gitea have a “GitHub/GitLab pages” feature?

Gitea doesn’t provide a built-in Pages server. You need a dedicated domain to serve static pages to avoid CSRF security risks.

For simple usage, you can use a reverse proxy to rewrite & serve static contents from Gitea’s raw file URLs.

And there are already available third-party services, like a standalone pages server or a caddy plugin, that can provide the required functionality.

In Gitea, an “active” user refers to a user that has activated their account via email.

A “login prohibited” user is a user that is not allowed to log in to Gitea anymore

Setting up logging

Official Docs

What is Swagger?

Swagger is what Gitea uses for its API documentation.

All Gitea instances have the built-in API and there is no way to disable it completely. You can, however, disable showing its documentation by setting ENABLE_SWAGGER to false in the api section of your app.ini. For more information, refer to Gitea’s API docs.

You can see the latest API (for example) on https://try.gitea.io/api/swagger

You can also see an example of the swagger.json file at https://try.gitea.io/swagger.v1.json

Adjusting your server for public/private use

Preventing spammers

There are multiple things you can combine to prevent spammers.

By whitelisting or blocklisting certain email domains
By only whitelisting certain domains with OpenID (see below)
Setting ENABLE_CAPTCHA to true in your app.ini and properly configuring RECAPTCHA_SECRET and RECAPTCHA_SITEKEY
Settings DISABLE_REGISTRATION to true and creating new users via the CLI, API, or Gitea’s Admin UI

Only allow/block certain email domains

You can configure EMAIL_DOMAIN_WHITELIST or EMAIL_DOMAIN_BLOCKLIST in your app.ini under [service]

Only allow/block certain OpenID providers

You can configure WHITELISTED_URIS or BLACKLISTED_URIS under [openid] in your app.ini

NOTE: whitelisted takes precedence, so if it is non-blank then blacklisted is ignored

Issue only users

The current way to achieve this is to create/modify a user with a max repo creation limit of 0.

Restricted users

Restricted users are limited to a subset of the content based on their organization/team memberships and collaborations, ignoring the public flag on organizations/repos etc.__

Example use case: A company runs a Gitea instance that requires login. Most repos are public (accessible/browsable by all co-workers).

At some point, a customer or third party needs access to a specific repo and only that repo. Making such a customer account restricted and granting any needed access using team membership(s) and/or collaboration(s) is a simple way to achieve that without the need to make everything private.

Enable Fail2ban

Use Fail2Ban to monitor and stop automated login attempts or other malicious behavior based on log patterns

How to add/use custom themes

Gitea supports three official themes right now, gitea (light), arc-green (dark), and auto (automatically switches between the previous two depending on operating system settings). To add your own theme, currently the only way is to provide a complete theme (not just color overrides)

As an example, let’s say our theme is arc-blue (this is a real theme, and can be found in this issue)

Name the .css file theme-arc-blue.css and add it to your custom folder in custom/public/css

Allow users to use it by adding arc-blue to the list of THEMES in your app.ini

SSHD vs built-in SSH

SSHD is the built-in SSH server on most Unix systems.

Gitea also provides its own SSH server, for usage when SSHD is not available.

Gitea is running slow

The most common culprit for this is loading federated avatars.

This can be turned off by setting ENABLE_FEDERATED_AVATAR to false in your app.ini

Another option that may need to be changed is setting DISABLE_GRAVATAR to true in your app.ini

Can’t create repositories/files

Make sure that Gitea has sufficient permissions to write to its home directory and data directory.

See AppDataPath and RepoRootPath

Note for Arch users: At the time of writing this, there is an issue with the Arch package’s systemd file including this line:

ReadWritePaths=/etc/gitea/app.ini

Which makes all other paths non-writeable to Gitea.

Translation is incorrect/how to add more translations

Our translations are currently crowd-sourced on our Crowdin project

Whether you want to change a translation or add a new one, it will need to be there as all translations are overwritten in our CI via the Crowdin integration.

Push Hook / Webhook aren’t running

If you can push but can’t see push activities on the home dashboard, or the push doesn’t trigger webhook, there are a few possibilities:

The git hooks are out of sync: run “Resynchronize pre-receive, update and post-receive hooks of all repositories” on the site admin panel
The git repositories (and hooks) are stored on some filesystems (ex: mounted by NAS) which don’t support script execution, make sure the filesystem supports chmod a+x any-script
If you are using docker, make sure Docker Server (not the client) >= 20.10.6

SSH issues

If you cannot reach repositories over ssh, but https works fine, consider looking into the following.

First, make sure you can access Gitea via SSH.

ssh git@myremote.example

If the connection is successful, you should receive an error message like the following:

Hi there, You've successfully authenticated, but Gitea does not provide shell access.
If this is unexpected, please log in with password and setup Gitea under another user.

If you do not get the above message but still connect, it means your SSH key is not being managed by Gitea. This means hooks won’t run, among other potential problems.

If you cannot connect at all, your SSH key may not be configured correctly locally. This is specific to SSH and not Gitea, so will not be covered here.

SSH Common Errors

Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

This error signifies that the server rejected a log in attempt, check the following things:

On the client:
- Ensure the public and private ssh keys are added to the correct Gitea user.
- Make sure there are no issues in the remote url. In particular, ensure the name of the Git user (before the @) is spelled correctly.
- Ensure public and private ssh keys are correct on client machine.
On the server:
- Make sure the repository exists and is correctly named.
- Check the permissions of the .ssh directory in the system user’s home directory.
- Verify that the correct public keys are added to .ssh/authorized_keys.
  
  Try to run Rewrite '.ssh/authorized_keys' file (for Gitea SSH keys) on the Gitea admin panel.
- Read Gitea logs.
- Read /var/log/auth (or similar).
- Check permissions of repositories.

The following is an example of a missing public SSH key where authentication succeeded, but some other setting is preventing SSH from reaching the correct repository.

fatal: Could not read from remote repository.
Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

In this case, look into the following settings:

On the server:
- Make sure that the git system user has a usable shell set
  - Verify this with getent passwd git | cut -d: -f7
  - usermod or chsh can be used to modify this.
- Ensure that the gitea serv command in .ssh/authorized_keys uses the correct configuration file.

Missing releases after migrating repository with tags

To migrate an repository with all tags, you need to do two things:

Push tags to the repository:

 git push --tags

(Re-)sync tags of all repositories within Gitea:

gitea admin repo-sync-releases

LFS Issues

For issues concerning LFS data upload

batch response: Authentication required: Authorization error: <GITEA_LFS_URL>/info/lfs/objects/batch
Check that you have proper access to the repository
error: failed to push some refs to '<GIT_REPO_URL>'

Check the value of LFS_HTTP_AUTH_EXPIRY in your app.ini file.

By default, your LFS token will expire after 20 minutes. If you have a slow connection or a large file (or both), it may not finish uploading within the time limit.

You may want to set this value to 60m or 120m.

How can I create users before starting Gitea

Gitea provides a sub-command gitea migrate to initialize the database, after which you can use the admin CLI commands to add users like normal.

How can I enable password reset

There is no setting for password resets. It is enabled when a mail service is configured, and disabled otherwise.

How can a user’s password be changed

As an admin, you can change any user’s password (and optionally force them to change it on next login)…
- By navigating to your Site Administration -> User Accounts page and editing a user.
- By using the admin CLI commands.
  
  Keep in mind most commands will also need a global flag to point the CLI at the correct configuration.
As a user you can change it…
- In your account Settings -> Account page (this method requires you to know your current password).
- By using the Forgot Password link.
  
  If the Forgot Password/Account Recovery page is disabled, please contact your administrator to configure a mail service.

Why is my markdown broken

In Gitea version 1.11 we moved to goldmark for markdown rendering, which is CommonMark compliant.

If you have markdown that worked as you expected prior to version 1.11 and after upgrading it’s not working anymore, please look through the CommonMark spec to see whether the problem is due to a bug or non-compliant syntax.

If it is the latter, usually there is a compliant alternative listed in the spec.

Upgrade errors with MySQL

If you are receiving errors on upgrade of Gitea using MySQL that read:

ORM engine initialization failed: migrate: do migrate: Error: 1118: Row size too large...

Please run gitea convert or run ALTER TABLE table_name ROW_FORMAT=dynamic; for each table in the database.

The underlying problem is that the space allocated for indices by the default row format is too small. Gitea requires that the ROWFORMAT for its tables is DYNAMIC.

If you are receiving an error line containing Error 1071: Specified key was too long; max key length is 1000 bytes... then you are attempting to run Gitea on tables which use the ISAM engine. While this may have worked by chance in previous versions of Gitea, it has never been officially supported and you must use InnoDB. You should run ALTER TABLE table_name ENGINE=InnoDB; for each table in the database.

If you are using MySQL 5, another possible fix is

SET GLOBAL innodb_file_format=Barracuda;
SET GLOBAL innodb_file_per_table=1;
SET GLOBAL innodb_large_prefix=1;

Why Are Emoji Broken On MySQL

Unfortunately MySQL’s utf8 charset does not completely allow all possible UTF-8 characters, in particular Emoji. They created a new charset and collation called utf8mb4 that allows for emoji to be stored but tables which use the utf8 charset, and connections which use the utf8 charset will not use this.

Please run gitea convert, or run ALTER DATABASE database_name CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_general_ci; for the database_name and run ALTER TABLE table_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_general_ci; for each table in the database.

You will also need to change the app.ini database charset to CHARSET=utf8mb4.

Why are Emoji displaying only as placeholders or in monochrome

Gitea requires the system or browser to have one of the supported Emoji fonts installed, which are Apple Color Emoji, Segoe UI Emoji, Segoe UI Symbol, Noto Color Emoji and Twemoji Mozilla. Generally, the operating system should already provide one of these fonts, but especially on Linux, it may be necessary to install them manually.

Stdout logging on SystemD and Docker

Stdout on systemd goes to the journal by default. Try using journalctl, journalctl -u gitea, or journalctl <path-to-gitea-binary>.

Similarly, stdout on docker can be viewed using docker logs <container>.

To collect logs for help and issue report, see Support Options.

Initial logging

Before Gitea has read the configuration file and set-up its logging it will log a number of things to stdout in order to help debug things if logging does not work.

You can stop this logging by setting the --quiet or -q option. Please note this will only stop logging until Gitea has set-up its own logging.

If you report a bug or issue you MUST give us logs with this information restored.

You should only set this option once you have completely configured everything.

Warnings about struct defaults during database startup

Sometimes when there are migrations the old columns and default values may be left unchanged in the database schema. This may lead to warning such as:

2020/08/02 11:32:29 ...rm/session_schema.go:360:Sync2() [W] Table user Column keep_activity_private db default is , struct default is 0

These can safely be ignored, but you are able to stop these warnings by getting Gitea to recreate these tables using:

gitea doctor recreate-table user

This will cause Gitea to recreate the user table and copy the old data into the new table with the defaults set appropriately.

You can ask Gitea to recreate multiple tables using:

gitea doctor recreate-table table1 table2 ...

And if you would like Gitea to recreate all tables simply call:

gitea doctor recreate-table

It is highly recommended to back-up your database before running these commands.

Why are tabs/indents wrong when viewing files

If you are using Cloudflare, turn off the auto-minify option in the dashboard.

Speed -> Optimization -> Uncheck HTML within the Auto-Minify settings.

How to adopt repositories from disk

Add your (bare) repositories to the correct spot for your configuration (repository.ROOT), ensuring they are in the correct layout <REPO_ROOT>/[user]/[repo].git.
- Note: the directory names must be lowercase.
- You can also check <ROOT_URL>/admin/config for the repository root path.
Ensure that the user/org exists that you want to adopt repositories for.
As an admin, go to <ROOT_URL>/admin/repos/unadopted and search.
- Users can also be given similar permissions via config ALLOW_ADOPTION_OF_UNADOPTED_REPOSITORIES.
If the above steps are done correctly, you should be able to select repositories to adopt.
- If no repositories are found, enable debug logging to check for any specific errors.

FAQ