In this tutorial, we’ll install and configure Gogs on CentOS Linux.

What is Gogs?

Gogs is a self-hosted Git service that provides much of the functionality of Github. It is written in Go, and is available as a single binary.

Before you install it, you can try a demo of Gogs.

Installation of Gogs

In this tutorial, we will install Gogs in /opt/gogs, and will use MariaDB as the database.

1. Install MariaDB

First – you will need a database server – Install MariaDB on your CentOS Linux instance.

2. Create database

You’ll also need to create a database, and database username & password. It’s important to create this database with the utf8-mb4 character set.

You can use this tutorial to create the database.

3. Add a gogs user

useradd -d /opt/gogs gogs

4. Create gogs repository parent directory

mkdir /opt/gogs-repositories

5. Download Gogs

At the time of writing, the latest version of Gogs is 0.11.29

wget https://cdn.gogs.io/0.11.29/linux_amd64.tar.gz -O /opt/gogs.tar.gz

6. Extract Gogs & set ownership

cd /opt/ && tar xzvf gogs.tar.gz

chown -R gogs:gogs /opt/gogs
chown gogs:gogs /opt/gogs-repositories

7. Config

For setup purposes, start Gogs manually, as the gogs user:

su -c '/opt/gogs/gogs web' gogs

Gogs should now be running. Connect to it in your browser via http://<GOGS_IP>:3000/, you should be greeted with the Gogs installation/setup screen.

Database Settings

Enter the database credentials that you created in Step 2.

Application General Settings

Set the Repository Root Path to /opt/gogs-repositories
Set Run User to ‘gogs’
Set the domain to the DNS name of the Gogs instance, ie. git.centosblog.com
Application URL – for set up, set it to http://<GOGS_IP>:3000/

Email Service and Server and Other Settings

Some of these settings are optional – configure as necessary to your set up here.

Admin Account Settings

Set your initial admin user account here, the username must be something else other than “admin”.

When all your settings are set, Click ‘Install Gogs’

Once Gogs has been installed, it will persist settings to /opt/gogs/custom/conf/app.ini – you can change Gogs settings directly by editing this file.

Now that we have set up Gogs interactively, CTRL+C the running instance of it so that we can set it up as a service.

8. Gogs systemd service

Note: the following systemd file has been adapted from the default systemd service file provided with Gogs.

vim /etc/systemd/system/gogs.service

:

[Unit]
Description=Gogs
After=network.target
After=mariadb.service

[Service]
Type=simple
User=gogs
Group=gogs
WorkingDirectory=/opt/gogs
ExecStart=/opt/gogs/gogs web
Restart=always
RestartTimeout=30
Environment=USER=gogs HOME=/opt/gogs

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Enable Gogs and start the service:

systemd enable gogs && systemd start gogs

Gogs should now be up and running as a service!

 

Final Steps

I would strongly suggest that you configure Gogs to run behind an HTTPS reverse proxy. When do you configure Gogs behind a reverse proxy, you will need to be sure to update the domain and application URL in the Gogs configuration file (/opt/gogs/custom/conf/app.ini) so that URLs and links will be correct.

For example, if you choose to run Gogs behind an HTTPS reverse proxy configured at https://git.centosblog.com/ you will need to update your domain to “git.centosblog.com” and your application URL to “https://git.centosblog.com/”