Migrating From Gitlab to Forgejo

About five years ago, I migrated my project management from JIRA to Gitlab. There were some initial teething problems but, over the last half decade, Gitlab has served my needs pretty well. The urge to replace it, though, has been growing. Gitlab is pretty resource heavy and I've previously had to migrate other workloads off the host because they were impacted by Gitlab's RAM gobbling ways. Last year, I upgraded Gitlab and found that the behaviour of the UI had changed: the issue listing page opened issues in a drawer, with no way to set the default back to the original behaviour. That eventually became possible in a later release but, still, the experience rankled. This week, I decided that it was time to finally do something about my Gitlab install and so set about migrating to Forgejo. This post talks about some of that experience - it's not a walkthrough guide on migrating, and instead addresses some sticking points that I ran into along with some tooling I created along the way.…