this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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Is it safe to open a forgejo git ssh port in my router? (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by gurapoku@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hello all! Yesterday I started hosting forgejo, and in order to clone repos outside my home network through ssh://, I seem to need to open a port for it in my router. Is that safe to do? I can't use a vpn because I am sharing this with a friend. Here's a sample docker compose file:

version: "3"

networks:
  forgejo:
    external: false

services:
  server:
    image: codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo:7
    container_name: forgejo
    environment:
      - USER_UID=1000
      - USER_GID=1000
      - FORGEJO__database__DB_TYPE=postgres
      - FORGEJO__database__HOST=db:5432
      - FORGEJO__database__NAME=forgejo
      - FORGEJO__database__USER=forgejo
      - FORGEJO__database__PASSWD=forgejo
    restart: always
    networks:
      - forgejo
    volumes:
      - ./forgejo:/data
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
      - "222:22" # <- port 222 is the one I'd open, in this case
    depends_on:
      - db

  db:
    image: postgres:14
    restart: always
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_USER=forgejo
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=forgejo
      - POSTGRES_DB=forgejo
    networks:
      - forgejo
    volumes:
      - ./postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data

And to clone I'd do

git clone ssh://git@<my router ip>:<the port I opened, in this case 222>/path/to/repo

Is that safe?

EDIT: Thank you for your answers. I have come to the conclusion that, regardless of whether it is safe, it doesn't make sense to increase the attack surface when I can just use https and tokens, so that's what I am going to do.

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[–] h3ndrik@feddit.de 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

As of now all advice here is kinda missing the point or wrong... (Exept the one recommendation to do updates ;-) I wouldn't use Cloudflare as it's really bad for freedom, watches your traffic and most interesting things aren't even in the free/cheap plans... You can't restrict connections to the "Established state" or you can't ever connect to your server... And SSH is a safe protocol. Just depends on the strength of your passwords... And yeah, opening ports is never 100% safe. Neither is using computers. They can be hacked but that's not helping... And I'd agree using Wireguard or Tailscale would help. But you already said you don't want a VPN...

I didn't have a proper look at the Forgejo Docker container. I'd say it's safe. It's probably using keys instead of passwords(?!) I hope they configured it properly if they ship it per default. And it's running sandboxed in your Docker container anyways and not running a system shell on the machine.

The issue with SSH is, there are lots of bots scanning the internet for SSH servers and testing passwords all day. Your server will be subject to a constant stream of brute-forcing attempts. Unless you take some precautions. Usually that's done by blocking attackers after some amount of failed login attempts. This is either preconfigured in your Docker container (you should check, or watch the logs.) Or you'd need to use something like fail2ban on top. Or ignore the additional load and have all your users use good passwords.

(What I do is use Git over https. That worked out of the box while ssh would have required additional work. But I also have lots of other ports forwarded to several services on my home-server. Including ssh. No VPN, no Cloudflare ... I have fail2ban and safe passwords. I'm happy with that.)