Freedesktop.org Successfully Migrates GitLab Instance to Hetzners IT Infrastructure

On March 22, 2025, Freedesktop.org successfully completed the migration of its GitLab instance to the IT infrastructure of the German hosting provider Hetzner. The project engineers managed to finish this task within a week.

The GitLab instance for Freedesktop.org not only supports X.Org projects but also Mesa, Wayland, and numerous other open-source Linux projects. During the migration, Freedesktop.org temporarily disabled the GitLab instance hosted on Equinix Metal, backed up all databases and developments, and moved everything to Hetzner. According to the engineers’ estimates, the process was smooth and orderly, although development on the GitLab instance was paused for all hosted projects. This meant that projects like Mesa did not have any new commits for a week, but their maintainers have since begun to catch up on the lost time.

«Due to a surge in spam, we had to implement restrictions for new accounts. Please visit this wiki page for instructions on obtaining full permissions. We apologize for the inconvenience,» the project team explained.

On March 16, 2025, Freedesktop.org initiated a week-long process to migrate its GitLab instance to a new IT infrastructure, with plans to restore services by March 22.

At the beginning of March, Benjamin Tissoires warned users of the Freedesktop.org project’s GitLab instance that it would be unavailable for a week starting March 16 due to the migration.

Previously, Tissoires explained the situation to clients and users of Freedesktop.org, detailing the planned move of its platform, which provides solutions based on free and open-source software aimed at compatibility and shared technologies for open-source graphical and desktop systems, to a new IT infrastructure for its widely used GitLab instance in various open projects.

At the end of January 2025, the administration of Freedesktop.org announced it was searching for a new home for its GitLab instance. The telecommunications company Equinix, which had hosted gitlab.freedesktop.org for free for nearly five years, requested that the instance be moved to another location (or start paying) by the end of April 2025. The project administration quickly planned a seamless migration from Equinix Metal to Hetzner’s hosting solution before the deadline at the end of April and also intended to use Fastly as a CDN. Freedesktop.org plans to deploy a Kubernetes cluster based on the IT infrastructure of the German hosting provider Hetzner.