News · written 9 November 2026. A summary for readers, not technical advice — check the sources at the end for the details.

Gitea is a free, open-source, self-hosted Git service: code hosting, issues, pull requests, packages and its own Actions for builds — all running on a server you look after yourself.

What happened

The Gitea project released Gitea 28.3.0 on 1 November 2026, the third maintenance release of the 28 series, with 60 merged pull requests. In the project's words, it "contains a large number of security fixes, mostly around token scopes" — the release post lists 21 of them. Token scopes are the limits you set on an access token, such as "read-only" or "repositories only"; several fixes stop tokens from reaching more than their scope allows.

The project's advice is clear: "We strongly recommend that all users upgrade as soon as possible."

Changes you might notice

Some security fixes change behaviour, so scripts and integrations may need a look after upgrading:

• The /api/v1/user routes only accept individual and bot accounts.
• User and organization feeds need a token with the read:user or read:organization scope.
• The API refuses changes to archived repositories.
• The release binaries are built with Go 1.27.3.

Faster, and fewer Actions surprises

• Issue and pull-request dashboards and repository lists are faster.
• Jobs from repositories with Actions turned off are no longer picked up, and on SQLite the admin job queue no longer reads nearly every job row.
• Contributor statistics no longer get stuck, and migrations from OneDev 16.8 and newer work again.
• Small additions: webhook notifications mention release assets, and project milestones can be filtered by linked issues.

What it means for people who ship software

If you host your code — or your app's releases — on your own Gitea, plan the upgrade to 28.3.0 now, and check any scripts that use access tokens or the user API once you have upgraded.

Sources

• Gitea Blog — release post for 28.3.0, 1 November 2026 (security list, notable fixes, upgrade advice).
• Gitea on GitHub — Release v28.3.0 (full changelog).

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