Today I learned about Grebedoc — static site hosting for git forges.
Grebedoc is Codeberg spelled backwards. I find this name very clever, especially since it has “doc” in it (static site hosting can be used for Markdown Documentation|documentation).
This is a new option for Static Website Hosting, which can serve as an alternative to GitHub Pages. Codeberg already a similar solution called Codeberg Pages, though Codeberg Pages had a big scary warning that says it is in maintenance mode. Grebedoc is using new software, git-pages, so does not rely on Codeberg/pages-server (which is the part of the Codeberg Pages stack that is in maintenance mode).
Origin Story
One of Grebedoc maintainers here! I came up with the idea for Grebedoc (and its underlying software, git-pages) when I realized that I have an extreme degree of dependency on GitHub Pages from many years of using GitHub, but it also seemed pretty likely that sooner or later, GitHub will stop subsidizing my efforts one way or another, and I need a backup plan.
I originally wanted to just use Codeberg Pages, but it had some significant scaling and uptime issues (that I don’t want to rehash here). I ended up concluding that the reasonable way forward is a redesign, which is what I’ve built and deployed with a small team of other volunteers. It took about a month of work and the whole thing, anycast and all, costs about 35€/mo to run. Also, Codeberg Pages is currently trialing the use of git-pages as the new pages backend, and you should be able to use it on the *.codeberg.page domain already (it responds to the same POST/PUT requests as Grebedoc)/
The fact that the entire global stack “costs about 35€/mo to run” is impressive. Though, I wonder what the increase in cost will be when more people start using Grebedoc.
Can I use Grebedoc for my personal projects?
One of my concerns was that Grebedoc sites would have to use a Codeberg repository. Codeberg looks good, though it is more limiting than GitHub or GitLab since they require every repo to use an open source license. This also raises concerns when creating a website/blog of my own, will any content hosted on a Codeberg repo also have to be licensed for the public domain?
However, based on grebedoc.dev, using Codeberg is not mandatory. There is a small learning curve to understanding how to host a site on Grebedoc, but the main page explains different scenarios clearly. There is a size limitation:
The size of a website is currently limited to 1 GiB. We are aiming to eventually raise this to 10 GiB.
UPDATE: Originally, the size limit was 768 MiB, but this has recently been raised to 1 GiB.
Based on all of that, it looks like I should be able to host small websites (up to 1 GiB) on Grebedoc, no matter which Git forge I choose to use and the repo can also remain private. I can use my own domains if I want, though Grebedoc also allows using *.grebedoc.dev or *.codeberg.page subdomains. All of this is free, as far as I can tell there is no paid-tier (Codeberg is a non-profit, they can be supported, but this is not required for using anything they offer).
Resources
- Grebedoc — static site hosting for git forges
- Grebedoc – static site hosting for Git forges | Hacker News
- Grebedoc — static site hosting for git forges | Lobsters
- Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people - Markus Unterwaditzer
