Gitea on GCP (git.daw.club)

Self-hosted Gitea instance for daw.club project management, running on a GCE e2-small VM behind a global HTTPS load balancer.

Architecture

                   ┌──────────────┐
  git.daw.club ──► │  Cloudflare  │  DNS (A record → LB IP)
                   └──────┬───────┘
                          │
                   ┌──────▼───────┐
                   │  GCP Global  │  Static IP: 34.117.234.171
                   │  HTTPS LB    │  Managed SSL cert (auto-renew)
                   │  + HTTP→HTTPS│  HTTP 301 redirect
                   └──────┬───────┘
                          │
                   ┌──────▼───────┐
                   │  GCE e2-small│  us-central1-a
                   │  Debian 12   │  30GB pd-ssd
                   │  Gitea 1.22.6│  Port 3000
                   │  SQLite + LFS│  /var/lib/gitea/data
                   └──────────────┘

GCP Resources

Resource	Name	Details
Project	`gen-lang-client-0380481603`
VM	`gitea-server`	e2-small, us-central1-a, Debian 12
Static IP	`gitea-lb-ip`	34.117.234.171 (global)
Instance Group	`gitea-ig`	Unmanaged, us-central1-a
Health Check	`gitea-health-check`	HTTP :3000/, 30s interval
Backend Service	`gitea-gce-backend`	Global, EXTERNAL_MANAGED
URL Map	`gitea-url-map`	Default → gitea-gce-backend
URL Map (redirect)	`gitea-http-redirect`	HTTP 301 → HTTPS
SSL Cert	`gitea-cert`	Managed, git.daw.club
HTTPS Proxy	`gitea-https-proxy`	→ gitea-url-map
HTTP Proxy	`gitea-http-proxy`	→ gitea-http-redirect
Forwarding Rule	`gitea-https-rule`	:443 → gitea-https-proxy
Forwarding Rule	`gitea-http-rule`	:80 → gitea-http-proxy
Firewall	`allow-health-check`	tcp:3000 from GCP health check ranges
Service Account	`gitea-cloudrun@...`	storage.objectAdmin on GCS buckets
GCS Buckets	`songbird-gitea-data`, `songbird-gitea-lfs`	`songbird-gitea-lfs` mounted via gcsfuse for LFS object storage

VM Details

OS: Debian 12
Gitea: v1.22.6 (binary install at /usr/local/bin/gitea)
Config: /etc/gitea/app.ini
Data: /var/lib/gitea/data/ (SQLite DB, repos)
LFS storage: GCS bucket songbird-gitea-lfs (via gcsfuse mount at /mnt/gcslfs)
Service: systemd unit gitea.service
User: git (system user)

Common Operations

# SSH into the VM
gcloud compute ssh gitea-server --zone=us-central1-a --project=gen-lang-client-0380481603

# Check Gitea status
sudo systemctl status gitea

# View Gitea logs
sudo journalctl -u gitea -f

# Restart Gitea
sudo systemctl restart gitea

# Edit config (requires root)
sudo vim /etc/gitea/app.ini
sudo systemctl restart gitea

# Create admin user
sudo -u git /usr/local/bin/gitea admin user create \
  --config /etc/gitea/app.ini \
  --username admin \
  --password <password> \
  --email admin@daw.club \
  --admin

# Backup
sudo -u git /usr/local/bin/gitea dump --config /etc/gitea/app.ini

Cost

GCE e2-small: ~$15/month (0.5 vCPU, 2GB RAM)
30GB pd-ssd: ~$5/month
Static IP: Free (while attached to a running VM)
Load balancer: ~$18/month (forwarding rules + backend)
SSL cert: Free (Google-managed)
GCS LFS storage: ~$0.02/GB/month (Standard class)
Total: ~$38/month (VM + disk + LB + GCS)

DNS

Managed via Cloudflare:

git.daw.club → A record → 34.117.234.171 (GCP LB static IP)
Cloudflare proxy disabled (DNS only) — GCP LB handles SSL

LFS on GCS

Git LFS objects are stored in the songbird-gitea-lfs GCS bucket via gcsfuse, which mounts the bucket as a local filesystem at /mnt/gcslfs. Gitea uses its standard PATH-based LFS storage pointing to the mount, so no HMAC keys or S3 credentials are needed — the VM’s attached service account (gitea-cloudrun@...) provides authentication automatically. The mount is managed by a systemd mount unit (mnt-gcslfs.mount) that starts before Gitea.

# Check mount status
sudo systemctl status mnt-gcslfs.mount

# View mounted files
ls /mnt/gcslfs/

# Remount if needed
sudo systemctl restart mnt-gcslfs.mount
sudo systemctl restart gitea

# View gcsfuse logs
sudo journalctl -u mnt-gcslfs.mount -f

Future: Cloud Run for Headless DAW

The GCS bucket songbird-gitea-data and Artifact Registry (us-central1/songbird) are already provisioned for future Cloud Run deployments of the headless DAW instances. The load balancer can be extended with additional URL map rules to route DAW traffic.

Collaboration Server

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Gitea on GCP (git.daw.club)

Gitea on GCP (git.daw.club)

Architecture

GCP Resources

VM Details

Common Operations

Cost

DNS

LFS on GCS

Future: Cloud Run for Headless DAW

​Gitea on GCP (git.daw.club)

​Architecture

​GCP Resources

​VM Details

​Common Operations

​Cost

​DNS

​LFS on GCS

​Future: Cloud Run for Headless DAW

Gitea on GCP (git.daw.club)

Architecture

GCP Resources

VM Details

Common Operations

Cost

DNS

LFS on GCS

Future: Cloud Run for Headless DAW