Soft Serve

A nice rendering of some melting ice cream with the words ‘Charm Soft Serve’ next to it

A tasty, self-hostable Git server for the command line. 🍦

Configure with git
Create repos on demand with git push
Browse repos with an SSH-accessible TUI
Easy access control
- Allow/disallow anonymous access
- Add collaborators with SSH public keys
- Repos can be public or private

Where can I see it?

Just run ssh git.charm.sh for an example.

Installation

Soft Serve is a single binary called soft. You can get it from a package manager:

# macOS or Linux
brew tap charmbracelet/tap && brew install charmbracelet/tap/soft-serve

# Arch Linux
pacman -S soft-serve

You can also download a binary from the releases page. Packages are available in Alpine, Debian, and RPM formats. Binaries are available for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Or just install it with go:

go install github.com/charmbracelet/soft-serve/cmd/soft@latest

Setting up a server

Make sure git is installed, then run soft. That’s it.

A Docker image is also available.

Configuration

The Soft Serve configuration is simple and straightforward:

# The name of the server to show in the TUI.
name: Soft Serve

# The host and port to display in the TUI. You may want to change this if your
# server is accessible from a different host and/or port that what it's
# actually listening on (for example, if it's behind a reverse proxy).
host: localhost
port: 23231

# The access level for anonymous users. Options are: read-write, read-only
# and no-access.
anon-access: read-write

# You can grant read-only access to users without private keys.
allow-keyless: false

# Which repos should appear in the menu?
repos:
  - name: Home
    repo: config
    private: true
    note: "Configuration and content repo for this server"
  - name: Example Public Repo
    repo: my-public-repo
    private: false
    note: "A publicly-accessible repo"
  - name: Example Private Repo
    repo: my-private-repo
    private: true
    note: "A private repo"

# Authorized users. Admins have full access to all repos. Regular users
# can read all repos and push to their collab-repos.
users:
  - name: Beatrice
    admin: true
    public-keys:
      - ssh-rsa AAAAB3Nz...   # redacted
      - ssh-ed25519 AAAA...   # redacted
  - name: Frankie
    collab-repos:
      - my-public-repo
      - my-private-repo
    public-keys:
      - ssh-rsa AAAAB3Nz...   # redacted
      - ssh-ed25519 AAAA...   # redacted

When soft is run for the first time, it creates a configuration repo containing the main README displayed in the TUI as well as a config file for user access control.

git clone ssh://localhost:23231/config

The config repo is publicly writable by default, so be sure to setup your access as desired. You can also set the SOFT_SERVE_INITIAL_ADMIN_KEY environment variable before first run and it will restrict access to that initial public key until you configure things otherwise. If you're having trouble, make sure you have generated keys with ssh-keygen as configuration is not supported for keyless users.

Pushing (and creating!) repos

You can add your Soft Serve server as a remote to any existing repo:

git remote add soft ssh://localhost:23231/REPO

After you’ve added the remote just go ahead and push. If the repo doesn’t exist on the server it’ll be created.

git push soft main

The Soft Serve TUI

Soft Serve serves a TUI over SSH for browsing repos, viewing READMEs, and grabbing clone commands:

ssh localhost -p 23231

It's also possible to “link” to a specific repo:

ssh localhost -t -p 23231 REPO

Server Settings

In addition to the Git-based configuration above, there are a few environment-level settings:

SOFT_SERVE_PORT: SSH listen port (default 23231)
SOFT_SERVE_HOST: SSH listen host (default 0.0.0.0)
SOFT_SERVE_KEY_PATH: SSH host key-pair path (default .ssh/soft_serve_server_ed25519)
SOFT_SERVE_REPO_PATH: Path where repos are stored (default .repos)
SOFT_SERVE_INITIAL_ADMIN_KEY: The public key that will initially have admin access to repos (default ""). This must be set before soft runs for the first time and creates the config repo. If set after the config repo has been created, this setting has no effect.

A note about RSA keys

Unfortunately, due to a shortcoming in Go’s x/crypto/ssh package, Soft Serve does not currently support access via new SSH RSA keys: only the old SHA-1 ones will work.

Until we sort this out you'll either need an SHA-1 RSA key or a key with another algorithm, e.g. Ed25519. Not sure what type of keys you have? You can check with the following:

$ find ~/.ssh/id_*.pub -exec ssh-keygen -l -f {} \;

If you’re curious about the inner workings of this problem have a look at:

Feedback

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this project. Feel free to drop us a note!

License

MIT

Part of Charm.

Charm热爱开源 • Charm loves open source

przemas-k/soft-serve