As free software programmers, whether we like it or not, we often host our projects on large centralized and proprietary software forges such as GitHub. In theory, it is perfectly possible to host our own forges using free software such as GitLab, Gitea, etc. But, life is short, and setup and maintenance of these services is more work than it seems at first.

GNU Guix is well-known as a package manager, for the high quality of its packages, and for the strong reproducibility guarantees it provides. But, it is much less appreciated for its services, system definitions and deployment features. That's such a shame since these features can let you summon and dismiss entire systems at will—be they bare-metal or virtualized—with nothing but a declarative plain text configuration file.

In this talk, I will speak about guix-forge, a Guix channel that provides Guix services for easy setup and maintenance of a software forge. guix-forge uses existing free software such as cgit and/or klaus for serving git repositories on the web, laminar and webhook for continuous integration, uacme for managing TLS certificates, etc.