FOSS Fos or FOSS may refer to: Companies * Foss A/S, a Danish analytical instrument company *Foss Brewery, a former brewery in Oslo, Norway * Foss Maritime, a tugboat and shipping company Historic houses * Foss House (New Brighton, Minnesota), Unite ...

development communities, a forge is a web-based

collaborative software Collaborative software or groupware is application software designed to help people working on a common task to attain their goals. One of the earliest definitions of groupware is "intentional group processes plus software to support them". As re ...

platform for both developing and sharing computer applications. The term ''forge'' refers to a common prefix or suffix adopted by various platforms created after the example of

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirroring ...

. This usage of the word stems from the metalworking forge, used for shaping metal parts. For software developers it is an online service to host the tools they need to communicate with their coworkers. The source code itself is stored in a

revision control In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...

system and linked to a wide range of services such as a bug database, continuous integration, etc. When a

development community forks, it duplicates the content of the forge and is then able to modify it without asking permission. A community may rely on services scattered on multiple forges: they are not necessarily hosted under the same domain. For instance it is not uncommon for discussions to be hosted on Discourse while the source code is hosted on Gitea. For users, a forge is a repository of computer applications, a place where bugs can be reported, a channel to be informed of security issues, etc. Software forges became popular in 2001, and have proven successful as a software development environment for millions of software projects.

Technology

Two different kinds of concepts are commonly referred to by the term ''forge'': * a ''service'' offered on a Web platform to host software development projects; * an integrated set of ''software'' elements which produce such platforms, ready for deployment. All these platforms provide similar tools helpful to software developers working in the hosted projects: * source code management systems * mailing-lists or forums *

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pub ...

s * download services *

bug tracking system A bug tracking system or defect tracking system is a software application that keeps track of reported software bugs in software development projects. It may be regarded as a type of issue tracking system. Many bug tracking systems, such as thos ...

Some provide other features as well: * code review

Interoperability

API and webhooks

In addition to the web

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

, it is common for a forge to provide a

REST Rest or REST may refer to: Relief from activity * Sleep ** Bed rest * Kneeling * Lying (position) * Sitting * Squatting position Structural support * Structural support ** Rest (cue sports) ** Armrest ** Headrest ** Footrest Arts and enter ...

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

with the a documentation (

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continu ...

, GitLab, Gitea, etc.) to enable

interoperability Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader defi ...

with other products. Forge users can also install webhooks to notify a third party online service when an event happens on their software project (for instance the webhook can be called when a new issue is created).

Federation

Federation A federation (also known as a federal state) is a political entity characterized by a union of partially self-governing provinces, states, or other regions under a central federal government ( federalism). In a federation, the self-govern ...

and the associated protocol

ActivityPub ActivityPub is an open, decentralized social networking protocol based on Pump.io's ActivityPump protocol. It provides a client/server API for creating, updating, and deleting content, as well as a federated server-to-server API for delive ...

(introduced in 2018) allows forges to communicate with each other about their activities (for instance when issues are created or a commit is pushed). Although native federation support is sometime discussed or in progress it is not yet available. Third party projects emerged to bridge the gap such as a plugin for the pagure forge or a proxy supporting ActivityPub and translating it to

calls to the designated forge.

Authentication

There is no SSO that applications and users could rely on to authenticate with all forges. Instead it is common for a forge to support a number of authentication providers: if a user already has an account they can use it to authenticate on the forge and do not need to create a new account (for instance GitLab supports OAuth2 providers such as

). Some forges can act as an authentication provider (for instance Gitea is an OAuth2 provider as well as GitLab).

Integration

To improve the user and the system administrator experience when using multiple online services, some forges are integrated with popular third-party software and services such as

online chat Online chat may refer to any kind of communication over the Internet that offers a real-time transmission of text messages from sender to receiver. Chat messages are generally short in order to enable other participants to respond quickly. Ther ...

(for instance mattermost has a plugin for GitHub and is natively support by GitLab).

Examples

Free software

* Allura * FusionForge * Gitea * GitBucket (GitHub compatible) * Joinup (Drupal-based) * Kallithea * Launchpad Suite * Phabricator *

Redmine Redmine is a free and open source, web-based project management and issue tracking tool. It allows users to manage multiple projects and associated subprojects. It features per project wikis and forums, time tracking, and flexible, role-based acc ...

* SourceHut * Trac * Tuleap

Freemium software

* GitLab * GForge Advanced Server

Free online services

* Joinup collaboration platform * Launchpad * OSDN (Open Source Development Network) *

* GNU Savannah
sourcehut
(while in alpha)

Freemium online services

* GitLab *

Bitbucket Bitbucket is a Git-based source code repository hosting service owned by Atlassian. Bitbucket offers both commercial plans and free accounts with an unlimited number of private repositories. Services Bitbucket Cloud Bitbucket Cloud (previ ...

Discontinued software

* Savane (software) *

GForge GForge is a commercial service originally based on the Alexandria software behind SourceForge, a web-based project management and collaboration system which was licensed under the GPL. Open source versions of the GForge code were released from 2 ...

Community Edition (last release April 23, 2010), not to be confused with the proprietary

first released October 1, 2018.

Discontinued online services

* BerliOS (It was disbanded in 2014, some projects have been moved to Joinup collaboration platform.) *

CodePlex CodePlex was a forge website by Microsoft. While it was active, it allowed shared development of open-source software. Its features included wiki pages, source control based on Mercurial, TFVC, Subversion or Git, discussion forums, issue tracki ...

(Shut down on December 15, 2017) * Gitorious (deprecated, superseded by GitLab) * Gna.org *

Google Code Google Developers (previously Google Code) , application programming interfaces (APIs), and technical resources. The site contains documentation on using Google developer tools and APIs—including discussion groups and blogs for developers usi ...

* Open Source Assistive Technology Software (OATS) * Project Kenai (created by Sun Microsystems but shut down by Oracle) * Tigris.org (Shut down on July 1, 2020)

References

Project hosting websites {{programming-software-stub