Documentation/content/getting-started/faq.md

---
eleventyNavigation:
  key: FAQ
  title: Frequently Asked Questions
  parent: GettingStarted
  order: 80
---

## Codeberg's Structures

### What do I need to use Codeberg?

All you need to use Codeberg is your user account on Codeberg.org.
It is both free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-freedom,
as long as you follow our [Terms Of Use](https://codeberg.org/codeberg/org/src/TermsOfUse.md).

A membership in the backing non-profit association Codeberg e.V. is completely optional.
We still invite you to become part of our mission by joining it.
Your membership fee helps to improve the project,
and the distributed voting rights maintain a healthy governance of the project.

### Is Codeberg well funded?

Don't worry, the danger of having Codeberg disappear is low!

Codeberg is powered by donations and membership fees of the non-profit association.
The non-profit Codeberg e.V. members decide over the budget plans once a year,
and they take care to put some funds aside to allow for a certain runway even under exceptional circumstances.

However, if you compare Codeberg to platforms which charge a fee for every user,
Codeberg has significantly less funding.
We kindly ask you to consider setting up a recurring donation.

We can always make good use of donations. They allow us not only to operate the minimum services,
but extend the features, add new services, and generously offer more power e.g. for CI and Code Search.

### Where is Codeberg hosted?

Most of our services run on our own hardware in a rented facility in Berlin, Germany.
The networking and rack space is provided by another volunteer-driven association.

Certain tasks are offloaded to other locations and providers,
e.g. [netcup GmbH](https://www.netcup.de/) and [Hetzner Online GmbH](https://www.hetzner.com/).
This is for backups, redundancy, disaster recovery, DDoS protection,
efficiency (using spare resources provided to us) and various other reasons.
We make sure that your data is sufficiently protected and avoid large cloud providers where possible.

### Is Codeberg based on free/libre (and open-source) software?

In short, **yes** — And proudly so! Codeberg uses [Forgejo](https://forgejo.org)
which explicitly uses free software for development.
And you can easily host it yourself!

Some other examples of free software works that we use are:

- [Woodpecker CI](https://woodpecker-ci.org). It powers [Codeberg CI](/ci).
- [Weblate](https://weblate.org). It is what we use for [Codeberg Translate](https://translate.codeberg.org).
- [Codeberg Pages](https://codeberg.page). This is a "homebrewed" piece of
  software that is also [open-source](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/pages-server).
- The [Codeberg Voting System](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/codeberg_voting_system),
  which is used internally by our non-profit association to carry out votes among members.
- [Even the text you are reading right now](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Documentation/src/branch/main/content/getting-started/faq.md)
  is [licensed under a Creative Commons license](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Documentation/src/branch/main/LICENSE.md)!
- [Configuration and helper tools of Codeberg](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-Infrastructure/) are also freely available
  for you to study, improve and reuse.

We use the [Codeberg organization](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg) (as well as other
organizations that are linked in its description) to share what we have worked on.
More often than not, we also send patches to upstream projects; that way, we all win.

## Before I start using Codeberg

### Can I host content without a free and open-source license?

Codeberg is run by a non-profit association with an explicit mission of advancing
the creation and development of free content and free and open-source software.

This mission is shared by Codeberg's contributors, donors and association members.
We, and our servers, work tirelessly to provide you with our free service.
However, there is one thing that we expect from you in return:
To contribute back to the ecosystem by attaching a suitable license to the works that
you put out in public, so as to let others reuse and adapt your works.

**If you are not sure which license to choose,**
our documentation has a [licensing article](/getting-started/licensing).

**If you do not care about copyrighting your works,** please consider using a public domain
declaration (e.g. [Unlicense](https://unlicense.org/),
[Creative Commons Zero](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)
for multimedia assets),
or licenses of similar nature (e.g. [WTFPL](https://wtfpl.net),
[MIT No Attribution](https://opensource.org/license/mit-0)).

Using such licenses helps ensure that others can comfortably (re)use your works anyway.

**If you need private repositories for commercial projects** (e.g. because you represent a
company or are a developer that needs a space to host private freelance projects for your clients),
we would highly recommend that you take a look at [Forgejo](https://forgejo.org).
Forgejo is the Git hosting software that Codeberg runs.
It is free software and relatively easy to self-host.
Codeberg does not offer private hosting services.

Sometimes, we do tolerate repositories that are not licensed optimally (e.g. due to
historic reasons dating back decades). If you believe that your project should be exempt,
[please send us a formal request](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-e.V./requests).

### How about private repositories?

Codeberg's mission is to promote free/libre software.
Keeping software private is obviously not our primary use case,
but we acknowledge that private repositories are useful or necessary at times.

The rules of thumb are:

- If you are a **contributor to free/libre software projects**, we allow up to **100 MB of private content**
  for your convenience. Use it for your personal notes, your side project or any other you want to keep private.
  <details><summary>I need more clarification on this rule!</summary>
    We know that this rule is not the most precise, and it is mostly evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

  Our goal is to avoid abuse of our infrastructure for purposes not in line with our mission.
  If you are a heavy contributor to the free/libre software ecosystem and this is apparent from your profile,
  we might also accept if you use slightly more than 100 MB.

  If you are not heavily contributing to free/libre software, but obviously supporting the spirit of the ecosystem
  (e.g. by participating in projects by creating issues, doing translations or submitting tiny fixes),
  we're also happy to have you aboard.

  If you do not contribute to free/libre software (or if it is limited to your personal homepage),
  and we feel like you only abuse Codeberg for storing your commercial projects or media backups,
  we might get unhappy about that.
  </details>

- If your private content is strictly required for a free/libre software project (like team-internal discussions,
  preparation of security patches, or preparing a release for a limited amount of time),
  private content will also be tolerated.
- If you use more than 100 MB of private storage for the use cases mentioned earlier, please [send us a request](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-e.V./requests)
  and we can evaluate it.
- If you do not contribute to any free/libre software project at all, Codeberg is unfortunately not
  the right place for you. However, [check out the alternatives](/getting-started/what-is-codeberg/#alternatives-to-codeberg),
  we're sure you'll find a cozy place for your work.

### What is the size limit for my repositories? Are there quotas for packages, LFS, ...?

Codeberg strives to provide **everyone with the necessary resources** to develop high quality Free/Libre software.
There is no intention of monetizing you based on limits and quotas!
So there **is no quota for valid use-cases**!

However, we will review larger projects and reserve the right to deny service if we consider your resource usage unreasonable,
or if your usage impacts the quality and stability for other users.

If you intend to use more than:

- 750 MiB for Git storage
- 1.5 GiB of packages, LFS and attachments
- generally large CI resources

You should [request these resources first](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-e.V./requests)!

## I need to request more resources from an administrator. How do I do that?

We have a public repository, [Codeberg-e.V./requests](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-e.V./requests),
which allows users to issue such requests.

We have some predefined templates that allow you to easily issue requests for the following situations:

- Requesting access to Codeberg's self-hosted CI solution, Woodpecker CI.
- Requesting more storage for a private repository.
- Requesting the increase of the repository limit (100) for a user account or an organization.

If you need anything from us that goes beyond these examples, you may still use
that repository to do so. We will try our best to help!

### Can I pay you for more resources (private storage, CI, ...)

We appreciate your donation to cover our running costs.
If you use many resources, consider a higher donation.

However, as we want to provide every free/libre software project with equal chances and the resources they need,
we do not require payment for any specific service.
For your convenience, we allow [small amounts of works](#how-about-private-repositories%3F) that are not 100% compliant.

However, we do not accept any payments for exceptions to our rules:

- **Proprietary or private content**: The goal of our non-profit association is to support free/libre software
  development, not to become a "general-purpose code forge" like commercial code forges are.
  Adding such payment-based support for proprietary features would not only potentially challenge our non-profit status,
  but also hurt our community aspect. It would also require substantial time and energy to support such efforts,
  that we would rather spend on support free/libre projects.
- **Storage and CI/CD resources**: We happily accept free/libre projects of any size, within the realm of what our
  infrastructure can provide, independent of donations or payments. However, given that our infrastructure and the
  environment are common goods, please do not be wasteful with these resources and try to optimize your use of them.
  If your project hits to our resource limits despite best efforts of optimizing,
  please [reach out to discuss the options](https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-e.V./requests).

## Why can't I mirror repositories from other code-hosting websites?

Mirrors that pull content from other code hosting services were problematic for Codeberg.
They ended up consuming a vast amount of resources (traffic, disk space) over time, as
users that were experimenting with Codeberg would not delete those mirrors when leaving.

A detailed explanation can be found in [this blog post](https://blog.codeberg.org/mirror-repos-easily-created-consuming-resources-forever.html).

If you need a mirror, you can create manual mirrors
[by adding multiple remotes to your local repository and using `git push --mirror`](https://git-scm.com/docs/git-push#Documentation/git-push.txt---mirror).
Pull requests, issues, as well as other repository units can be disabled in
your repository's settings. Using this option will skip the deletion of
internal references.

## Using Codeberg

### I removed an object from my repo, why doesn't the reported size shrink?

By default, removing tracked files from Git keeps them in the history.
You'd need to rewrite history and force-push the branch,
or remove all branches your object is included in.

Still, in order to prevent inadvertently removed history which may be useful for code reviews,
we keep those objects around for approximately 30 days.

Afterwards, they will be removed by the regular Git garbage collector on our servers.