Defending a Self-Hosted Git Forge Against AI Scraping Attacks
By
todsacerdoti
5mo ago· 30 min readenInsight
100/100
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Summary
The article details a personal experience where the author discovered their self-hosted Git forge (Forgejo) was being overwhelmed by AI scrapers making hundreds of thousands of queries daily, causing severe performance issues. The author investigates the problem, identifies the scraping patterns, and implements various technical solutions to protect their system, including rate limiting, IP blocking, honeypot traps, and other defensive measures against automated data harvesting.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledi investigated, thinking it would be a trivial little problem to solve. Soon enough, however, i would uncover hundreds of thousands of queries a day from thousands of individual IPs, fetching seemingly-random pages in my forge every single day, all the time.
This post summarizes the practical issues that arose as a result of the onslaught of scrapers eager to download millions of c
A summary of the techniques in place to protect my git forge
A summary of the techniques in place to protect my git forge
