I am running gitea 1.10.0 in a Kubernetes cluster with a persistent volume for /data.
I have set all the environment variables to my settings and that only seems to pass it to the install procedure (that’s kinda bad).
I finished the install procedure and then later realised I needed to change the ssh domain. Changing the environment variable and restarting is completely ignored, so I go find the ini file and edit it, and restart. At this point ALL my repos are wiped out!
It seems that if you edit the config, it triggers the install procedure on next start, which for some reason empties the repositories folder!
This is a REALLY bad situation and I’m lucky I hadn’t committed much to using gitea so far.
Also, this means the database and filesystem are out of sync and you can’t delete the repos that are missing because they 500… which is just logged as 500 and no details… 
It should not trigger the install procedure except you changed INSTALL_LOCK from true to false.