Running a personal Git server is something that has been on my mind for quite a long time. One of the most popular solutions I have seen around is Gitea. A couple of months ago, when trying out different things, I decided to run Gitea locally to see how easy it would be to implement on my server. It turns out pretty easy, especially if you are using Docker. However, my server doesn't run Docker as of now and it also felt like customizing it would be hard (for example, getting rid of the username in the URLs). Gitea looks like a very good solution for self-hosting Git (and the sites look very nice!), but in my case, it felt like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. I figured most self-hosted Git solutions would turn out to be a bit too much for my use case, so I decided to look into hosting Git without any other program.
I had experience setting up a bare-bones Git server only usable through SSH, so I looked up how to
create a website with the bare repositories. It turns out there's even a built-in
option1! Other programs have more or less similar looks,
but I decided to check if there was any way to have a static generator for the webpage—the fewer
things running on my server the better! And there is one (that I found):
stagit. It is very simple, and it does the job.
On top of that, the program is super small, which makes it very easy to modify it if needed2. I gave it a try and it worked nicely. I decided that it
was a good solution for my use case, therefore having a vanilla Git server would work, so I
started building it3.
Let's see how to set it up!
What will happen is we'll have bare repositories on our server which we'll then
clone/fetch/push to using SSH4. We'll put these
repositories on the /srv/git directory—because I keep everything served from my
server on /srv—but any location will work. To keep Git separated from the root user,
we'll create a new git user, with /srv/git as its home folder, this way,
the remote address will be git@domain:repo.git (no need for an absolute address).
Let's do that:
useradd -d /srv/git git
mkdir /srv/git
chown git /srv/gitNow, let's create the folder for the SSH configuration where we'll add our public key.
su git
cd
mkdir .ssh && chmod 700 .ssh
touch .ssh/authorized_keys && chmod 600 .ssh/authorized_keys
We could stop here, adding our key to the file (you can also use ssh-copy-id), but we
can take a couple more steps to isolate the user from the server, useful especially if you want to
share access to the git user with someone else.
To do that, we'll use the git-shell shell, which will only run scripts found on
~/git-shell-commands.5
chsh git -s $(which git-shell)
Now if you add someone else's public SSH key to the server, they won't be able to run any command.
If you want to allow some commands, create scripts on ~/git-shell-commands. For
example, I have scripts to initiate repositories, add SSH keys and other useful commands, you can
see them all here.
Now we can pull and push to our repository, and we can share access to them by adding SSH keys (or sharing the password if you use one). However, we might want to have public repositories that people should be able to clone without the need to have access to all of them. To do so, we'll use the Git Daemon (that uses the Git Protocol). All we have to do is run the following command (and keep it running, I recommend running a systemd service if you use systemd, there is an example here).
git daemon --reuseaddr --base-path=/srv/git/ /srv/git/
This daemon will only serve repositories that have a file named git-daemon-export-ok
in them, so if you want to make a certain repository public, all you have to do is run:
touch /srv/git/repo.git/git-daemon-export-ok
Remove that file to make it private again. The cloning address will be
git://domain/repo.git and you can't push to that address. You can also serve
repositories through HTTP which will allow you to have fine-grained control over who can access
which repositories, look it up if you are interested.
Now we can host private and public repositories, but we may want to share the public ones easily. A website is a good way to allow people to quickly see your repositories without the need to clone every single one of them. We'll use stagit to create the HTML files which we'll host as a static site. First of all, let's install stagit:
git clone git://git.codemadness.org/stagit
cd stagit
sudo make installTo create a website for a repository run
stagit /path/to/repo.gitfrom the directory where you want the site built. To create an index file with all your repositories simply run
stagit-index /path/to/repo-1.git /path/to/repo-2.git > index.html
with the path to all your repositories. Make sure you have the correct information on the
owner, description and url files so that stagit uses them
when creating the HTML.
Having to do this is every time you update your repositories is not a reasonable solution, but we
can set up a post-receive hook to do it for us. There are examples of scripts to use
as an initial creation script for the whole site and a post-receive hook on stagit's source code
repository. I have changed those scripts a bit to only process public repositories (the ones with
the git-daemon-export-ok file) as well a modified the source a bit. You can find the
changes on my stagit fork.
I have only been using this server for a couple of days, but I have also been setting up a bunch of suckless tools6, so I have been using Git a lot. One of the best things is that setting up repositories is very easy. No need to open a browser, log in to GitHub and go through the process of creating a new repository7. I just run
ssh git@oscarbenedito.com
init reponame
Done! I can also set it up as public by running a script I have on my git-shell and
change the description/owner/url just as easily.
Another thing I have noticed is that Git's clone/fetch/push commands are significantly faster on this server than GitLab or GitHub. However, I don't know compared to a self-hosted instance of Gitea or Gogs.
One thing that might be missed by this setup is the ability to download a tarball with the code from a certain commit, browse the code as it was in a given commit, see git blame, etc. This could be solved by using another tool for the website part—such as cgit—so if I ever want to do that, it shouldn't be hard.
Another thing is how the website looks. Other self-hosting solutions like Gogs, Gitea, GitLab... look a lot nicer than stagit. However this isn't a priority right now and I appreciate the ability to have full control over how the server works—and it has been very interesting to learn about it all. Once again this is something to do with the website, and not the repository hosting itself.
It has been fun to set everything up and realize how easy it is to self-host Git without the need for other software. On top of that, I can now share my repositories from my domain, which means it is easier to stop using other hosting services if I stop wanting to accept their policies, similar to having email on my domain.
For now, I will still have my public repositories hosted on GitLab and GitHub, as I don't mind it and some people might be more used to those UIs. They also act as a backup in case something happens to my server or if I want to edit my repositories from a computer without SSH access to my server.
Finally, I have talked about some software that will allow you to self-host Git, but I don't want to end this post without mentioning sourcehut. I find it a very good solution because everyone can contribute to your projects without the need to create yet another account. Everything is done through email, which is nicely supported by Git (learn more here).
I almost forgot! If you want to check out my Git website or clone some repositories from my domain, you can find all of that here: https://git.oscarbenedito.com.
Edit: The post originally said that creating a new repository on GitLab was a long process. However, you can just push to a new remote address and GitLab will automatically create the new repository.
git instaweb from a Git repository to try it. ↩.git directory of a
repository. Indeed, you can clone a repository from your computer running git clone
/path/to/repo/.git cloned-repo. This directory contains all the information of the
repository, that is why Git is distributed. ↩chsh command doesn't work, make sure git-shell is in
/etc/shells, if not, add it manually. ↩