Files
gitea/docs/build-setup.md
bircni c68925152b docs: add development setup guide (#37960)
Moves the "Hacking on Gitea" page out of the documentation website and into the repository as `docs/development.md`, so contributors find build and test instructions next to the code. The content has been cleaned up and corrected for in-repo use.

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Signed-off-by: bircni <bircni@icloud.com>
Co-authored-by: wxiaoguang <wxiaoguang@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Lunny Xiao <xiaolunwen@gmail.com>
2026-06-17 06:39:22 +00:00

2.6 KiB

Setup and requirements

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.

Requirements

Go

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.

Node.js and pnpm

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.

Make

Gitea uses Make to drive builds, linting, and tests. On Windows it can be installed via MSYS2 or Chocolatey.

Python with uv (optional)

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.

Git LFS

The integration tests require Git LFS to be installed.

Getting the source code

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea

To 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.

Installing dependencies

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).