Installing Forgejo on Synology NAS with Docker

Forgejo is a fork of Gitea. While most people use Gitea as their personal Git server on NAS, I decided to instlal Forgejo instead becuase I appreciate their philosophy and community approach.

Installing Forgejo using a docker-compose file in Portainer is the simplest method. Here's the configuration I used:

services:
  forgejo:
    image: codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo:14
    container_name: Forgejo
    hostname: forgejo
    security_opt:
      - no-new-privileges:true

    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "wget", "--no-verbose", "--tries=1", "--spider", "http://localhost:3000"]
      interval: 30s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 5

    ports:
      - "3053:3000"
      - "2222:22"

    volumes:
      - /volume1/docker/forgejo/data:/data:rw
      - /etc/TZ:/etc/timezone:ro
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro

    environment:
      - USER_UID=1026
      - USER_GID=100
      - ROOT_URL=https://forgejo.yourname.synology.me

      # SQLite configuration (optional but explicit)
      - GITEA__database__DB_TYPE=sqlite3
      - GITEA__database__PATH=/data/forgejo.db

    restart: unless-stopped

Important notes:

• Update the prot numbers to match your preferences
• Modify the envrionment variables according to your NAS settings (sepcailly USER_UID and USER_GID)

When you first access the web interface, you only need to chang the port number in the setup page to match your configuration. The, uncheck the "disable self-registration" checkbox and click the "Install" button. The setup should complete without any issues.

Most Forgejo installaion guides online recommend using PostgreSQL as the database. However, I consistently encourted errors with that setup, which led me to use SQLite instead. For my use case, SQLite works perfectly fine since I plan to use GitHub for sharing larger, collaborative projects anyway.