Gitea, a lightweight, open-source platform for hosting Git repositories, similar in purpose to GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket but designed to be simple, fast, and easy to self-host, has just released version 1.24.
One of the most impactful changes in this release is making Gitea exclusively use its internal Git configuration, completely ignoring the system-wide “/etc/gitconfig.” This move addresses longstanding conflicts arising from external configuration overrides by enforcing “GIT_CONFIG_NOSYSTEM=1” on all Git commands.
Users who previously customized “/etc/gitconfig” will need to migrate their settings to Gitea’s internal config file, usually located under “{AppDataPath}/home/.gitconfig.”
Additionally, the router log format has improved for clarity and consistency, helping administrators monitor and troubleshoot web requests more easily. Plus, markdown rendering now aligns more closely with GitHub’s behavior, with new options to detect and disable problematic math code blocks by default.
Security is also boosted by introducing a global setting to enforce two-factor authentication via TOTP or WebAuthn for all users. This new option ensures that users without 2FA enabled can still log in and browse public content, but cannot read or write repositories through the API or web interface.
Regarding new features, Gitea 1.24 significantly improves collaboration workflows and repository access control. Notably, it introduces anonymous access for private and unlisted repositories, allowing administrators to grant limited public visibility to code, issues, and wikis without fully opening the repository. This nuanced access control caters to projects requiring privacy with controlled sharing.
Other user-centric enhancements include:
- Support for private README files in organizations, with “.profile-private” accessible only to members.
- A file tree pane in the file view page for easier navigation of repository contents.
- Material icon themes for file lists, enhancing visual clarity.
- The ability to select which email to use when committing changes via the web UI.
- Basic authentication support for RSS and Atom feeds.
On the performance side, this release incorporates multiple backend optimizations. Batch querying reduces redundant database lookups when listing commits, and caching of GPG keys, emails, and users further minimizes database load.
Expensive queries behind user dashboards and heatmaps have been optimized with new indexes and caching strategies, resulting in up to sixfold speed increases in some cases.
Moreover, pagination on user dashboards has been simplified to just previous and next buttons, streamlining navigation even when millions of records exist. The pull request list API now avoids spawning multiple subprocesses by using a base Git repository for commit retrieval, greatly improving responsiveness.
Gitea 1.24 also introduces refined project management tools, including a full-screen mode for Kanban boards to improve task visibility. Worktime tracking is now available at the organization level, providing admins with detailed summaries filtered by time periods, repositories, milestones, and members, supporting better resource management.
In addition, issue tracking benefits from sorting by exclusive labels for prioritization, sub-issue list expansion for enhanced context, and options to delay conflict checking on inactive pull requests to reduce server load.
Lastly, developers will appreciate the extended API coverage with endpoints for managing action artifacts, runner registration, and workflow event dispatch. New CLI flags enhance LDAP group configuration, while middleware has been introduced for request prioritization to protect against abusive scrapers.
On the UI side, commit views, pull request forms, and action job logs have received usability upgrades. The commit creation process now supports choosing from multiple emails, making identity management cleaner during collaborative editing.
For more information, see the announcement.
Image credits: Gitea Project
