Githereum

Githereum is a smart contract and set of tools that aim to be a distributed replacement for centralized repository hosting such as github or gitlab.

It consists of an ethereum smart contract and a cli for interacting with it.

The contract allows administering and sharing repos, the state of which is tracked on-chain allowing setting owners and writers, allowing distributed control of who has access to a repository along with cryptographically guaranteeing that different users have the same view of the state of the repo.

Storage is off-chain, with a pluggable storage backend that supports S3, IPFS, google-drive and more

Distributing the repo content can be accomplished via any method including through offline distribution through the "sneakernet", allowing coordination of repository state even in scenarios where communication is unreliable or of low bandwidth

Installation

We recommend using npm, not yarn, to install this package. This package relies on ZOS (OpenZeppelin), which relies on npm.

To install this project locally, execute:

git clone <repository url>
cd githereum
npm install

Usage

After deploying the contract, this is how to use the CLI.

In the examples below, <contract> is the address of the contract you deployed, <path> is the local path to your git repo, and <tag> is the name of the tag to push to or clone from.

Githereum

Usage:
  npx truffle exec cli.js <contract> register <repo> [<blob storage>] [options]
  npx truffle exec cli.js <contract> push <path> <repo:tag> [options]
  npx truffle exec cli.js <contract> clone <repo:tag> <path> [options]
  npx truffle exec cli.js <contract> pull <repo:tag> <path> [options]
  npx truffle exec cli.js <contract> head <repo:tag> [options]
  npx truffle exec cli.js <contract> (add|remove) owner <repo> <owner> [options]
  npx truffle exec cli.js <contract> (add|remove) writer <repo> <writer> [options]
  npx truffle exec cli.js <contract> (add|remove) reader <repo> <reader> [options]
  npx truffle exec cli.js keygen <keydir>

Options:
  -f, --from <address>     Address of transaction sender
  -h, --help               Show this screen
  -v, --version            Show version
  -p, --provider <url>     Web3 Provider address, default http://localhost:9545
  --private <keydir>  Directory of private key to use for this operation
  --public <keydir>   Directory of public key to use for this operation

Blob storage when registering a repo:
  This should be a json string containing a description of where the blobs for
  this repo are stored. This is written publically to the blockchain so should
  not contain secrets.

  Default:
    {"type":"tmpfile","path":"tmp/blobs"}

  S3:
    {"type":"s3","bucket":"my-s3-bucket"}

    S3 credentials can be provided with environment variables AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
    and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS KEY, or implicitly with security groups within AWS.

Local Setup

You can run and test githereum locally on your computer. Follow these steps to apply the contract to a local network, create a git repository with some commits, and write the commit SHAs to a local blockchain.

Clone this githereum repo, cd into the repo directory, and run npm install.
Open a second terminal window. There, run npx truffle dev. The truffle dev console will output a bunch of accounts and private keys. Copy one of the accounts to your clipboard. Leave this process running. Note that whenever you restart the truffle dev console, you will need to delete the zos.dev file and go through all the commands below again.
Go back to the first console and save the Account you copied as a variable, e.g. FROM=0xc57a80df9fea122036981e144d3b504512e85cd9.
npm run build - this builds the solidity contract
npx zos push --network development - this deploys the compiled contract to the fake truffle network running in the other terminal
npx zos create Githereum --network development --no-interactive - this will create an proxy instance of the contract that you can call functions on. It outputs as the last line an address. Save this address in a variable, e.g. CONTRACT_ADDRESS=0x41f9C54Ba41EB2f1f652fecE6053C4D25E4f33D6
Now you can run githereum commands! For example:
- First, register a repository name. Run npx truffle exec cli.js $CONTRACT_ADDRESS register some-name --from $FROM where some-name is any name of your choice.
- In another directory, create a new git repository some-name and add some commits to it. To write those commit SHAs on chain, run npx truffle exec cli.js $CONTRACT_ADDRESS push /path/to/some-name some-name:my-tag-name --from $FROM. Here, my-tag-name is any name of your choice, not a git tag.
- Check that your push was successful with npx truffle exec cli.js $CONTRACT_ADDRESS head some-name:my-tag-name --from $FROM. The on-chain SHA shown should match the SHA of the last commit you made to your some-name repository.
- Try cloning the repo into a new directory, npx truffle exec cli.js $CONTRACT_ADDRESS ../clone my-great-repo:one ../new-directory --from $FROM, cd ../clone, and run git status to see the commits.

Remote setup

Usage against a real network is similar to the local steps above. Pass in the --provider option with a web3 provider url.

Testing

From the command line execute: npm run build. This will clear the build/ folder and re-generate the ZOS proxy contracts.
Then run npx truffle dev. This spawns a private blockchain and displays the truffle console. Wait for the prompt to appear.
Back in the first terminal window that you ran npx truffle dev from, enter the command test in the truffle console. This will compile your contracts and run the tests.

You can just leave the truffle console running, and enter test from the truffle console in order to re-run your tests. Note that you should re-run npx truffle build (in a different terminal) anytime you make a modification to a ZOS contract's implementation in order to redeploy the proxy contract that wraps the implementation contract you modified.