Self-host Gitea on redu

Gitea is a lightweight, self-hosted Git service: repositories, issues, pull requests, and CI hooks, all in a single small package that people run as a private GitHub alternative. On redu, your agent runs Gitea on real EU infrastructure for you, so you set nothing up by hand.

License: Gitea is licensed under MIT. That is a permissive open source license, so you can self-host it freely. In this guide you are the operator, running Gitea on your own redu infrastructure.

Deploy it with your agent

Connect the redu MCP:


claude mcp add --transport http redu-cloud https://mcp.redu.cloud/mcp

Point your agent (Claude Code, or any MCP client) at Gitea’s official Docker setup and tell it:


Deploy Gitea on redu using its official docker-compose, and expose the web UI.

Your agent uses deploy_compose to bring the whole stack up on one EU VM with podman-compose up -d --build, then serves the Gitea web UI at https://<name>.redu.cloud. redu does not rewrite your compose file: it runs the official setup as-is and exposes the one service you point it at. The agent discovers the web service port at deploy time.

Database

Gitea can run on SQLite (its embedded default, no external database needed), or on PostgreSQL or MySQL for larger installs.

You have two clean options:

Keep it self-contained. With SQLite, Gitea needs no external database, so a single-VM deploy_compose is enough. If Gitea’s compose file includes its own database service (Postgres or MySQL), leave it in place and the default compose database mode runs it alongside Gitea on the same VM.
Use a redu managed Postgres. Have the agent provision a managed database and point Gitea at it:


Provision a redu managed Postgres and configure Gitea to use it.

redu injects the connection env into the compose project’s .env, including DATABASE_* aliases alongside the PG* variables, so Gitea’s Postgres settings line up without manual mapping.

Access it

Gitea comes up at https://<name>.redu.cloud with TLS already in place (a wildcard cert), so there is no per-app certificate setup. On first visit, Gitea walks you through its initial configuration and creating the first administrator account. Complete that once and your Git service is ready to use.

Keep it running

Deploys are self-healing: redu recreates and retries until Gitea actually runs, and get_deployment returns the build log if you want to see what happened. Day two, your agent can SSH into the VM (via get_ssh_command) to update Gitea, adjust its config, or fix an issue in place. Because these are real machines, the agent operates the app the same way you would.

What’s next

Stuck? support@redu.cloud