I’m a big fan of Fossil. The only reason I use other Git services like Github is because others use it. Though I have to admit that it’s easier to click a button to create a repo than to add a new repo to a self-hosted server.
A couple nice features of Fossil are:
You can start the server with
export FOSSIL_HOME=/home/user
fossil server --nocgi --localhost --extroot=/home/user/repo/ext
The first line tells Fossil where to find the configuration database. The second line can be used with fossil ui as well (it will open a new browser window, which you don’t want, for instance, when using WSL on Windows). Option --nocgi tells Fossil that it’s not being run as CGI on your web server. That makes life easier by not running in a chroot jail. Option --localhost restricts requests to come from the local computer. You don’t need that option with fossil ui because it’s on by default. --extroot= is the full absolute path to the directory that holds your CGI scripts.
You can add all kinds of functionality to your project with CGI extensions. For instance, you can add a viewer for arbitrary file types that are converted to HTML using Pandoc. Or you can use the database to store various types of information (like notes) and query them from inside the project.