Friendly Forge Format (F3)

The Friendly Forge Format (abbreviated F3) is an Open File Format for storing the information from a forge such as issues, pull/merge requests, milestones, release assets, etc. as well as the associated VCS (Git, Mercurial, etc.). F3 is designed to exchange the state of a software project between GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, etc. for backup, mirroring or federation. F3 is essential for a forge to provide key requirements. (i) Portability: the entire state of a software project can be dumped and restored at a later time, on a different development environment (ii) Versatility: when published and updated as a F3 archive, a software project effectively is Open Data on which an unlimited range of applications can rely, even outside of the forge domain (iii) Consistency: it provides a common language to use when talking about the forge related domains (iv) Trust: cryptographic signatures on each F3 dump guard against malicious or unintentional tampering that could compromise the integrity of a software project.