Simple self-hosted anonymous git server, written in Rust
Lighter weight than gitea, more modern than cgit or gitweb. For people who want to run a git server themselves, rather than depending on someone else, but don't want to put too much work into it.
Build your binary with cargo build --release. Then probably move it somewhere
sensible so it's in your $PATH or use cargo install --release. Packages and
prebuilt binaries are TBD.
You probably want to use your linux distro's init system to keep this server running.
Acquire a Linux server that you have ssh access to, and decide on the best place to place your repos. You can also do this locally to experiment with it.
To initialize a repo, you'll need to run a few commands. I'm using a
self-hosted instance of the agit repo as an example. Find a directory where
you want to host your repositories. This is using the default settings found in
agit.toml
git init --bare agit
cd agit
touch git-daemon-export-ok
# update "dumb http" server on updates
mv hooks/post-update.sample hooks/post-update
Update the description file with a description of the repository
Make sure the HEAD in your remote repo points to your default branch (e.g. master vs main)
Pushing your changes is not handled via agit -- this will be done over ssh. For example:
git remote add origin ssh://git@git.alexwennerberg.com:/www/git/agit
git push -u origin main
Set up a reverse proxy on an http server which forwards port 8081 (or whatever port you configure) to your agit server.
Self-hosting provides self-reliance and independence from large platforms that using a git hosting platform does not. There are inconvenciences and disadvantages to self-hosting, but I think there are also advantages as well of a decentralized, self-hosted network of collaboration. agit is designed primraily for hobbyists or open source hosts, so it's easy to setup and maintain with little effort, rather than an unnecessarily piece of software like GitLab. The tradeoff is that you lose out on a lot of features. Self-hosting git isn't for everyone!
The simplest way to accept patches when self-hosting Git is through git-send-email (guide). You can accept patches either to your personal email or use a mailing list. Basically only obsessive ideologues like myself still use git-send-email these days, so you will probably lose contributers, and not being on GitHub means you lose a lot of discoverability, so make sure that you're willing to accept that when self-hosting git. You can mitigate these issues by mirroring to GitHub, but that kind of defeats the purpose of self-hosting.
I am working on a sibling project to this that handles mailing list archives for exactly this purpose, but it is not ready for the public yet.
This exists on GitHub solely for visibility sake, and probably won't forever, but while it's here feel free to use GitHub issues, etc. This is alpha software, please report any bugs, etc!