www/content/blog/terraform/forgejo.md

title	description	date	tags
Writing an OpenTofu/Terraform provider for Forgejo	My second open source provider	2025-05-28	Forgejo OpenTofu terraform

Introduction

Last month I started writing an OpenTofu/Terraform provider for Forgejo. I wanted to automate this forge in the same way I already automate GitHub: create and manage repositories, provision actions secrets and variables, configure issue labels, manage mirrors, etc.

A community provider already existed but it is really barebones and missing almost all the resources I need. I could have tried to contribute to it, but after looking at the code I decided to start from scratch.

I wrote providers before so I could get right to it.

Writing a Terraform provider

My notes from [writing a Terraform provider for eventline]({{< ref "eventline.md" >}}) still apply. With a few previous experiences writing providers, this has become straightforward work.

The only significant difficulties and frustrations arose from the Forgejo API which is pretty inconsistent to say it nicely. A community SDK forked from Gitea exists but after looking at its code I decided to write my own small API client.

Conclusion

Writing a Terraform provider is a lot of fun, I recommend it! If you have a piece of software that you wish had a Terraform provider, know that it is not hard to make it a reality. It is also a great learning project, being well-bounded in scope and immediately useful.

Here is the repository of my Forgejo provider for reference and here is the documentation.