Keeping Two Gitea Repos in Sync (Work → Personal) Without Making It Complicated

Keeping Two Gitea Repos in Sync (Work → Personal) Without Making It Complicated

I wanted a simple way to keep a personal backup of a repository hosted on my employer’s work Gitea, while still being able to do occasional work from home.

The constraint: my networks are firewalled.

• On my work workstation (Mac), I can reach both servers:
  • Work Gitea server (RHEL)
  • Personal Gitea server (Debian)
• On my home workstation (Linux Mint), I can only reach personal Gitea.

So I use the work workstation as the go-between.

The guiding rule

Work Gitea is the source of truth for shared branches (like main).
Personal Gitea is:

1. a backup mirror of the work repo, and
2. a place to park “home-only” branches until I’m back on the VPN.

1) At work: sync Work → Personal (backup)

On the work workstation, I keep a bare mirror clone and push updates to my personal Gitea.

The basic idea is:

git fetch -p origin
git push backup --all
git push backup --tags

• origin = the work Gitea repo (RHEL)
• backup = the personal Gitea repo (Debian)

I can run this manually, or on a schedule, to keep my personal server up to date with branches + tags.

Important: I avoid git push --mirror here because I sometimes create home-only branches on the personal repo. --mirror can delete branches on the destination, which is not what I want.

2) At home: commit on a “home/*” branch

At home, I work normally, but I never commit directly to main on the personal server. Instead I create a clearly-named branch:

git checkout -b home/my-change
git push -u origin home/my-change

This keeps it obvious which branches are “home work in progress” versus the shared mainline.

3) Later, back at work: bring the home branch into Work Gitea

When I’m back on the work workstation (where I can reach both servers again), I pull that home branch from my personal repo and push it into the work repo:

git fetch backup home/my-change:home/my-change
git push origin home/my-change:home/my-change

From there I can open a PR on the work Gitea server and merge it like normal.

Why this workflow works

• Simple: only two remotes (origin and backup) and a few commands.
• Safe: main stays canonical on the work server.
• Flexible: I can still do real work from home without needing access to the work network.
• Auditable: the home/* naming makes it obvious what originated outside the work network.

That’s it—one repo, two Gitea servers, and no drama.

Fresh-start checklist (reset workstation repo before new work)

Before starting a new task, I reset my scratch branch to match main:

git checkout main
git pull --ff-only origin main

git checkout home/my-change
git reset --hard main
git push --force-with-lease origin home/my-change

Now home/my-change is a clean copy of main, ready for new commits.

(Only do this on a personal scratch branch—this rewrites branch history.)

--- Home → Work merge (run on WORK workstation that can reach both servers) ---

1) Refresh your local scratch branch from your HOME/PERSONAL Gitea (remote: backup)

git checkout home/my-change
git fetch backup home/my-change
git reset --hard backup/home/my-change

2) Merge refreshed scratch branch into WORK main (remote: origin) and push

git checkout main. git pull --ff-only origin main
git merge --no-ff home/my-change
git push origin main

(optional) Cleanup: delete the scratch branch locally and on work server

git branch -d home/my-change
git push origin --delete home/my-change