The API: where automation hooks in

A forge earns its keep through its API. Gitea exposes a full REST API, authenticated with a token, and that's how the rest of the platform automates against it: creating repos, managing CI secrets, reading workflow status, even creating the registration token a new CI runner needs.

curl -H "Authorization: token <REDACTED>" https://git.example.com/api/v1/...

That same API is what makes "infrastructure as code" reach all the way up to the forge itself — repos and their settings can be created and configured programmatically rather than clicked into existence. The CI runner registers through it; build pipelines authenticate through it.

Why we use this: anything with a good API can be automated, version-controlled, and reproduced. The day you want to recreate the whole lab from scratch, "the Git server has an API" is what lets the recreation script set up its own repositories instead of stopping to ask a human to click around.