scanservjs VS Gitea

My solution to use my workforce with paperless is scanservjs and scantopl and I'm pretty happy with it

I use scanservjs and scantopl on docker.

Recently I stumbled upon ScanServerJs, an awesome software that allows you to setup your own scan server.

Nothing to do with VueScan, but I just went through a journey trying to find a good solution for an old HP laserjet/scanner combo that I picked up used for $40. Although it's not wifi enabled, and has no Mac support (that I need for a couple of laptops in my household), I got it running perfectly on a Raspberry Pi, despite some difficulties with the HP driver "ecosystem". (Why do they make it so complicated..)

Once I got it working, I set up `saned` and was able to scan from my Ubuntu laptop over wifi just fine using `gscan2pdf`, which has a horrible user interface but at least gets the job done. Honestly it was a bit surprising to me to discover how terrible the scanning landscape still is in open source software, but I guess it's just not one of those things that is needed that often so some basic projects that were thrown together a decade ago still kind of work and that's that. I can accept that.

However, I absolutely could not manage to get any kind of "bridge" working for the Mac laptop, which apparently uses a different scanner API called TWAIN, and no amount of messing around with TWAIN/sane bridges worked out. Not to mention that one of the two Macs was a "work" laptop for which it was not allowed to install drivers or system software.

The whole time I was thinking, man, all I want is some web interface where I can log into the RPi and drive the scanner, and download the result, why is that so difficult. Lo and behold I came across this amazing project that solved the whole problem for me: https://github.com/sbs20/scanservjs. I'm not affiliated with it, but I was just so impressed at how well it worked that I feel the need to mention it, and give kudos to the author.

It was even easy to get running, just a single docker command on the RPi and it was up and running. The laptops can connect easily, of course, because it's just a local web server, and you can do multipage scans to PDF, which is really all I wanted. Fantastic bit of OSS, highly recommended if anyone finds themselves in a similar situation. Forget remote protocols and installing drivers, etc., just run this on the Pi and you're in business.

We currently have an HP M1136 MFP connected to CUPS on the local network. It always turns itself off and is never available. People have mostly resorted to walking over with their laptop and connecting via USB. Also there are no good network interfaces to the scanner. We use https://github.com/sbs20/scanservjs to control the scanner but it's too buggy and slow.

I've had an old all-in-one HP USB printer/scanner hooked up to a Raspberry Pi for a few years running CUPS. Network printing has been great via this method. But the scanner portion has sat unused ever since. Until, now.... WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME ABOUT SCANSERVER-JS?! My word this is incredible! It does for scanning what CUPS does for printing, and with a beautiful Web UI.

Create a system service. Download the file and save it to /etc/systemd/system/ or view the raw file in a browser and replace the URL with the version of Gitea you installed. You can find the list on https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/release/v1.22/contrib/systemd/gitea.service:

Linux Mint with Cinnamon: https://www.linuxmint.com/ as far as desktop OSes go it's familiar (Ubuntu without snaps by default), whereas the UI feels both snappy, doesn't use too much resources and is actually pretty to look at.

MobaXTerm: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/ this one is a bit more Windows centric but I ended up paying for it and replaced mRemoteNg and PuTTY with it, it's even better than Remmina or whatever Linux has to offer - you can manage SSH/RDP/VNC/... sessions, input across multiple sessions side by side and it just simplifies things a lot (jump host support, a port forwarding too and so much more).

GitKraken: https://www.gitkraken.com/ also a piece of software that I paid for, this one actually makes using Git pleasant, feels better to use than SourceTree and Git Cola (even though that latter is wonderfully lightweight, too) and honestly I prefer that to the CLI nowadays.

Kanboard: https://kanboard.org/ is a lightweight Kanban project management tool, it might not have every feature under the sun but it's the most snappy project management tool I've ever used, looks simple and runs well. I honestly love it, what a nice thing to have.

Most modern text editors and IDEs: I personally pay for JetBrains IDEs but also like Visual Studio Code as a text editor and both have helped me immensely, they're reasonably performant when you have the RAM, look nice, often give you suggestions about how to improve your code and also have a plethora of plugins in their ecosystems. Nowadays I unapologetically use LLMs as well and overall it feels like I have these great tools and cool autocomplete (that is sometimes a bit silly and wrong) at my disposal, that makes me happy.

Kdenlive: https://kdenlive.org/ imagine if there was a successor to Windows Movie Maker, though something that gets most of the important stuff out of Sony Vegas, except is also completely free and works on most platforms. Kdenlive is all of that and also somehow quite pleasant to use, I actually prefer it to DaVinci resolve. There is a bit of a learning curve to any piece of software like this, but everything mostly makes sense in this one.

Gitea: https://about.gitea.com/ I still use this for my personal Git repositories and integrating with CI systems and it's lightweight, looks good and just feels pleasant to use. Previously I self-hosted GitLab and constantly ran into resource exhaustion as well as doubts about the next update is going to corrupt all of my data and break (it did), so now I use Gitea instead.

Drone CI: https://www.drone.io/ a container native CI solution that I can also self host. It's container oriented, integrates with Gitea nicely, is similarly nice to GitLab CI and doesn't cause me headaches like Jenkins would.

Docker: https://www.docker.com/ yes, even Docker desktop. It just makes working with containers really pleasant and predictable, even when something like Podman also exists (and also is great). I don't know, I feel like Docker really saved me from having brittle legacy environments, even self-contained containers with health checks and resource limits with still the same brittle code inside of those make me feel way more safe.

Same [1]. Zoom being outsourced to the implementing platform is one major pain-point. That example from us has grown in size.

We are clearly using the wrong tool for a diagram of this complexity, but the practicality of seeing commit changes in the diff, what property was changed by whom and instantly having the visual feedback in the Pull Request is just way too useful to use a "proper" tool.

[1] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/25803

It's a tangent, but I think it's interesting that Gitea started trying to self host in Feb 2017 (https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029) and hasn't got there yet (based on how active the github issues/PR page are).

https://about.gitea.com/ offers me a "free cloud trial" and otherwise sounds very like other web front ends to git. So like github, except they don't trust it themselves.

In contract forgejo has "Self-hosted alternative to GitHub" written in big letters on the landing page. https://codeberg.org/forgejo is indeed self hosted.

Gitea is a versatile tool for creating and managing git-based repositories, streamlining Code Review to enhance code quality for users and businesses. It integrates a CI/CD system, Gitea Actions, compatible with GitHub Actions, allowing users to create workflows in YAML or use existing plugins. Gitea's project management features include issue tasks, labeling, and kanban boards for efficient management of requirements, features, and bugs. These tools integrate with branches, tags, milestones, assignments, time tracking, and dependencies to plan and track development progress. Furthermore, Gitea supports over 20 package management types, such as Cargo, Composer, NPM, and PyPI, catering to a wide range of public or private package management needs. This comprehensive suite of features makes Gitea a powerful platform for managing development projects and packages.

Golang has a ton of single binary websites out there. The two that come to mind off hand are Gogs/Gitea only because I contributed to them

https://github.com/gogs/gogs

https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea

My problem with Fossil is that it is a "one solution for all problems". Fossil packs all solutions together while the Git ecosystem provides several different solutions for each problem.

When you want to do things that Fossil is not meant to do, then you're in trouble. I have no idea on how to do CI/CD and DevOps with Fossil and how to integrate it with AWS/Azure/GCP.

I find that the whole ecosystem of Gitlab/Github and stand-alone alternatives like Gitea [1], Gogs [2], Notion, Jira and others is way more flexible and versatile.

[1] https://about.gitea.com/