Best alternatives to Anvil in 2026

If your team runs its own self-hosted Git server using Forgejo (a free, open-source alternative to GitHub), you've probably hit a wall: most of the developer tools you already rely on — command-line clients, dependency update bots, CI scripts — were built to talk to GitHub's API, not Forgejo's. Rewriting all of that plumbing is a lot of unpaid work just to keep using the tools you like. Anvil sits in between as a translator: it makes a self-hosted Forgejo instance answer like GitHub, so those existing tools keep working without anyone touching their code. Under the hood, Anvil is a proxy built on Shotgun, an OpenAPI-to-OpenAPI translation engine, and currently maps 75 of GitHub's 87 relevant API endpoints (about 86% coverage), covering users, repositories, branches, issues, pull requests, commit statuses, file contents, README rendering, labels, milestones, releases, webhooks, collaborators, Actions, search, and pagination. It has been tested against the gh CLI and Renovate, and is meant to slot into existing CI/CD scripts. Building it requires a Rust toolchain to compile the underlying Shotgun dependency, and deploying it for real use requires putting a reverse proxy such as Caddy or nginx in front for HTTPS, since gh CLI and most GitHub-compatible tooling expect TLS.