A Self Hosted Version Control Framework for Academic Project Management and Automated Evaluation

The management and evaluation of student software projects in academic institutions face significant challenges stemming from fragmented workflows, inadequate progress monitoring, and labor-intensive manual assessment procedures. This paper presents “GiteaForge,” a comprehensive framework that integrates self-hosted version control with automated evaluation capabilities through a unified web portal. Built on the PERN (PostgreSQL, Express.js, React, Node.js) stack and integrated with Gitea server, the system provides real-time progress tracking via Git webhooks, automated repository provisioning, browser-based code editing through Monaco Editor, and one-click execution via dynamically generated environment scripts. A systematic analysis of 40+ existing solutions identifies critical gaps in data sovereignty, workflow integration, and execution automation. The proposed framework addresses these limitations through a novel five-layer architecture implementing role-based access control, webhook-driven analytics, and containerized deployment. Preliminary evaluation with 15 participants suggests a potential reduction of up to 70–85% in assessment preparation time, indicates a possible improvement of ≈95% in progress visibility based on initial observations, and successful deployment on resource-constrained infrastructure. The framework contributes both theoretical foundations through the Academic Project Management Capability Framework (APMCF) and practical system integration steps for institutions seeking regulatory-compliant, self-hosted project management solutions. The system is currently under active development, and results are based on a prototype implementation and limited-scale evaluation.