This document lists the tools you need to build Gitea from source and how to get the code. Once your environment is ready, see development.md for the build and development workflow, and testing.md for running tests.
For the contribution workflow and review process, see CONTRIBUTING.md.
Install Go and set up your Go environment. The
required version is the one declared in go.mod; installing the same
version your continuous integration uses avoids gofmt differences between Go
releases.
Note
Some make tasks build external Go tools on demand (for example make watch-backend). To use them, the "$GOPATH"/bin directory must be on your
executable PATH; otherwise you have to manage those tools yourself.
Install Node.js to build the JavaScript and CSS
files. The minimum supported version is the one declared in
package.json (engines.node); the latest LTS is recommended.
Gitea manages frontend dependencies with pnpm. The make
targets invoke it for you, so installing pnpm manually is only needed if you want
to run pnpm commands directly.
Gitea uses Make to drive builds, linting, and tests. On Windows it can be installed via MSYS2 or Chocolatey.
Linting the templates, workflow files, and YAML requires Python tooling that Gitea
runs through uv. After installing uv, make creates
the environment automatically (uv sync); you only need this if you run
make lint-templates, make lint-yaml, or make lint-actions locally.
The integration tests require Git LFS to be installed.
Clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/go-gitea/giteaTo contribute changes, fork the repository on GitHub and add your fork as a git remote so you can push branches and open pull requests. See GitHub's working with forks documentation for the details.
Most build and test targets install the dependencies they need on their own. To
fetch everything up front, run make deps (or the per-group make deps-frontend,
make deps-backend, make deps-tools, make deps-py).