Self-hosted git

Git was made to be decentralized. Why trust only gitlab or github with your code? It’s actually extremely easy to set up your own git server, assuming you already have a VPS and domain name.

I set up read/write access to repos on my VPS using the standard git tutorial. Then, I went through my repos and git remote set-url origin <my-url>, adding github and gitlab remotes as well (so my code will be mirrored on my gitlab and my github). To make pushing commits to all my remotes easy, I added alias gua="git remote list | grep -v upstream | xargs -l git push" and alias gum="git remote list | grep -v upstream | xargs -I _ git push _ master" to my .zshrc file, allowing me to push the current branch or the master branch to all my remotes (except for upstream, which is usually not a repo I have write access to). To give people the ability to clone my repos directly from my server, I set up the git daemon with systemd. Now, I had read/write access to my repos, and the entire world can read my repos right from my new subdomain, git.aftix.xyz with the URL git://git.aftix.xyz/<repo>.git.

Now everyone can use my git server as I wanted them to. However, I also wanted to make my repos explorable in a browser over HTTPS. There are many solutions to this, such as cgit and git tea. These solutions are a bit much for me, as git tea has many features I don’t need (e.g. user logins and pull requests), and cgit uses cgi. Since my repos are small, I chose to serve static project pages via nginx. This matches well with my blog, which is also serving static pages over nginx. So, I built and installed stagit, which generates static pages from git repos (this is what suckless uses to make their git pages). After creating some git hooks and scripts, I just had to change the style to be consistent with my blog. I’m pleased with the results, but I do wish stagit supported javascript plugins so I could use code syntax highlighting. I could make a shell script that goes through the html pages and uses sed to insert a script tag before the closing body tag, but that would probably be very slow to run. Regardless, my git trees are now browsable at https://git.aftix.xyz. The only thing left to do is to see if I can make the dwm repo show the my_dwm branch instead of master.