Diffinery: Open-source GitHub and GitHub Actions alternative that runs entirely on Cloudflare

[u/Leading_Advance_8600]

Every time GitHub has an outage, Actions stops and teams sit around for hours waiting for CI to come back. We got tired of that, so we built Diffinery: a git forge with built-in CI that you deploy to your own Cloudflare account. No servers, no runner VMs.

- Runs your existing `.github/workflows/*.yml` unchanged, marketplace actions included
- Each job gets a fresh 4 vCPU / 12 GiB container, only while it runs
- Git hosting, PRs, code review, merge queue, issues, releases
- AI agents get their own accounts with guardrails (they can't merge their own PRs) plus a built-in MCP server
- One-step import from GitHub with history, issues and PRs

Still early, so check the roadmap for what's coming. Apache-2.0, feedback welcome!

https://github.com/codician-team/diffinery

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[u/BitterAd6419]

GitHub actions runs python, can this one run it ?

[u/Leading_Advance_8600 → u/BitterAd6419]

Each job runs on a full Ubuntu Linux runner, so Python works the same way it does on GitHub. actions/setup-python works, and so do pip, caching and matrix builds across Python versions. Your existing workflow YAML should run unchanged. Docs: https://diffinery.com/docs

[u/w3lzy → u/BitterAd6419]

Yes, it runs a Ubuntu container

[u/No-Boat8877]

This looks promising - if it can shift the cost in github minutes over to cloudflare that seems more ideal. The concerns we'd have would be
- We rely on release-please for versioning as we deploy our mobile, which relies on hitting the Github API
- We also run a couple android emulator specific smoke tests in our cicd which requires KVM
- And I'm assuming secrets would then be moved away from GHA to Cloudflare, how is this handled?

[u/Leading_Advance_8600 → u/No-Boat8877]

Thanks so much for writing this up.

release-please: Diffinery speaks the GitHub API (same paths as GitHub Enterprise, so gh works against it), so anything that lets you set a custom API URL should be able to point at it. I’ll be honest though, I haven’t tried release-please specifically yet. I’m testing it today and I’ll come back and let you know how it goes. If something breaks, I’ll fix it.

Android emulator / KVM: straight answer, not on the hosted runners right now. They run on Cloudflare Containers, which don’t give you /dev/kvm. What I’d suggest is hooking up a self-hosted runner on a machine with KVM just for those smoke tests and keeping everything else hosted. Your workflow stays the same, you only change runs-on for that one job.

Secrets: they live in Diffinery itself, encrypted, with repo, org and environment secrets like on GHA, and you use them exactly the same way (${{ secrets.FOO }}). The importer brings over the names, but you’ll have to paste the values in again, since GitHub never lets anyone read them back (which is honestly a good thing).

If you give it a try, I’d really love to hear how it goes.

[u/dtiziani]

is there a way to use just the actions part(runners), and keep using GitHub for the other parts?

[u/downtownmiami]

Yawn