So you've probably seen the news — Ghostty, the terminal emulator created by Mitchell Hashimoto (yes, the HashiCorp co-founder), is leaving GitHub. And if you've been following the broader conversation in the open-source community, Ghostty isn't alone. More projects are questioning whether GitHub is still the right home for their code.

This got me thinking about a practical problem: what does it actually take to migrate a project off GitHub without losing contributors, breaking workflows, or creating chaos?

I've helped move two mid-sized projects between forges, and let me tell you — the code is the easy part. Everything else is where it gets messy.

Why Projects Are Moving

Before we dig into the how, let's talk about the why. The reasons I keep hearing (and have experienced) boil down to a few themes:

Platform lock-in — GitHub Actions, GitHub Packages, Dependabot, code search... the more features you use, the harder it becomes to leave.…