My Forgejo instance was attacked by LLM crawlers
This post is a reaction to the attack that my server suffered from, that took place on the weekend of the 29th-30th of March. It happened even though my robots.txt file specifically asks bots not to visit any page of my Forgejo instance. I ended up having to set up aggressive nginx and fail2ban rules to block LLM crawlers.
Setting up Forgejo on Alpine with Nginx and Fail2ban
Forgejo is an awesome code hosting platform. It is a community-driven hard fork of Gitea, that is being developed over at Codeberg. In this article, I will provide a complete guide for setting up a self-hosted Forgejo instance on an Alpine Linux system, behind an nginx reverse proxy with TLS. Additionally, I will explain how to secure the instance against brute-force login attempts, using Fail2ban.
A new identity!
If you know me a bit, you probably know that until now, my name in online spaces has been Twann. However, I recently decided to get rid of this online pseudonym that I've been using for several years now. Here’s why, and how to call me now.