Building European Software
A complete software development workflow using only European and open-source tools.
We have accepted something remarkable and troubling: that the infrastructure of modern software development belongs to American coorporations. GitHub hosts our code, AWS runs our servers, Vercel deploys our applications, and Docker Hub stores our containers. These are not neutral platforms, they are commercial products controlled by entities outside our jurisdiction, answering to American law and American priorities.
The European Alternative
The solution is not to build everything from scratch. It is to assemble existing open-source and European tools into a coherent stack that replaces every American dependency. Here is an example:
Codeberg - European Git Hosting
Codeberg is a German collaborative platform for software development, running on Forgejo. It provides Git repositories, CI/CD pipelines, and everything else needed for modern version control. Codeberg also serves as a registry for your containers.
Forgejo runners - Self-Hosted CI/CD
Forgejo Actions is the CI/CD engine built into Forgejo, compatible with GitHub Actions workflows. These can be connected to your repositories on Codeberg, thus enabling automatic testing and deployment.
Podman - Daemonless Container Runtime
Podman is a Red Hat project, open source, designed to work without a central daemon. It is compatible with Docker containers and images but removes the security model issues of Docker's daemon architecture. Podman integrates with systemd for process management, making it ideal for production deployment on Linux servers.
Nginx - Reverse proxy
A high-performance, open source reverse proxy and load balancer
The Complete Workflow
Here is what a complete development workflow looks like, from writing code to deployment, with zero American dependencies:
Why This Matters
When Europe builds software on American infrastructure, we are guests in someone else's house. We follow their rules, we pay their prices, we accept their terms of service, and we remain subject to their jurisdiction.
But when we build our own infrastructure, host our own repositories, run our own CI/CD pipelines, store our own containers, and deploy our own applications on hardware we control, we become the hosts. We set the rules. We control access. We are subject to our own laws and the votes of European citizens have an influence.
This is digital sovereignty in practice. Not a policy document. Not a declaration. Actual, working infrastructure demonstrating that Europe can compete on a global level and not by copying American models, but by building something better: something open, something sovereign, something truly ours.
Conclusion
The stack described here is not theoretical. It is production-ready. It is what I use to run this website with. It is an example of what European companies and governments can use to build their software and own it.
The question is not if we can. The question is if we will.