I was getting a bit tired of manually upgrading Gitea, so I initially considered writing an Ansible playbook to automate the process.
However, after some research, I discovered Gitea’s fantastic feature of hosting Debian repositories and decided to build my own APT repository instead.
Since this is my first time building a Debian package, it’s far from perfect, but I plan to improve it over time. Currently:
No package signing yet (will be added later)
No user or config files are created
It simply replaces the binary under /opt/gitea/bin/
Comes with a systemd unit that expects Gitea to run under the gitea user
How to Install
If you want to try it, just add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gitea.list: deb [trusted=yes] https://git.24unix.net/tracer/gitea-deb/raw/branch/apt-repo/ ./
Then update and install: apt update && apt install gitea
If you prefer not to install binaries from a third party (which I totally understand – I’m neither a Debian maintainer nor affiliated with Gitea), you can build the packages yourself.
Just clone:
Maybe someone finds this useful!
Edit: There a currently packages for AMD64 and ARM64.
I wanted to share an update on the Debian repository I posted about earlier!
I’ve reorganized things and added a second dedicated repository just for building the .deb packages.
This separation keeps the release repository (gitea-deb) clean and focused, while the new gitea-deb-builder handles the automated fetching, verifying, and packaging process.
The current setup only handles final releases — it does not automatically package release candidates (RC) or pre-release versions.
For example, there’s an RC out right now that’s not picked up by my build script.
If there’s enough interest, I might extend the script to optionally include RC builds in a separate repo or section.
As before, the .deb packages currently:
Replace only the binary under /opt/gitea/bin/
Expect the systemd unit to run Gitea under the gitea user
Do not include package signing (yet; planned for later)
If you’re using the APT repo, the install line remains:
deb [trusted=yes] https://git.24unix.net/tracer/gitea-deb/raw/branch/apt-repo/ ./
Let me know if you’re interested in seeing RC or nightly builds included!
And thanks again to the Gitea team for making it so easy to hook into.
If you prefer to build the packages yourself, the build scripts and setup are available here: gitea-deb-builder repository
No package signing yet (will be added later)
I’ve reorganized things and added a second dedicated repository just for 