www/content/blog/terraform/forgejo.md

title	description	date	tags
Writing an OpenTofu/terraform provider for Forgejo		2025-05-28	Forgejo OpenTofu terraform

Introduction

Last month I started writing an OpenTofu/terraform for Forgejo. I wanted to automate this forge the same as I automate github already: create and manage repositories, provision actions secrets and variables, configure issue labels, managing 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 not to bother.

I wrote providers before so 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, this is really straightforward work.

The difficulty and frustration only came from the Forgejo's API which is pretty inconsistent to say it nicely. A community SDK forked from Gitea exists but I admit that I did not like its code much either and decided to write my own small API client.

Conclusion

Writing a terraform provider is still 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 bounded in scope and immediately useful.

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