Caddy + Cgit + Gitolite = Self-Hosted Git Repositories

Part of the beauty of git is that it is distributed. I’ve often hosted projects on more centralized services like GitHub or GitLab. I’ve also hosted some repos on private servers using just plain git and ssh. But, for a while now I’ve wanted to host mirrors of projects on my own servers, but still have some access control and a web interface. No need for the overhead of issues and pull requests if I accept patches via an email-based workflow.

I hope to flesh this blog post out a little more in the future, but for now, I just want to log some of the configuration hoops I needed to jump through to get things working. Previous posts I could find don’t use Caddy v2 (with caddy-cgi). Consider this a work in progress.

Install Dependencies

  • If you’re using plain Caddy, you will need to install Caddy with the caddy-cgi module. To do so, add the module on their download page.
  • Install the other system dependencies (gitolite3, cgit, etc).
    sudo apt install gitolite3 cgit python-is-python3 python3-pygments python3-markdown docutils-common groff
    

Configuration

This was on a server running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

  1. Make a git user.
    sudo adduser --system --shell /bin/bash --group --disabled-password --home /home/git git
    
  2. Configure gitolite of the git user (~/.gitolite.rc).
    # default umask gives you perms of '0700'; see the rc file docs for
    # how/why you might change this
    UMASK                           =>  0027,
    
    # look for "git-config" in the documentation
    GIT_CONFIG_KEYS                 =>  'gitweb.description gitweb.owner gitweb.homepage gitweb.category',
    
  3. Add caddy to the git group.
  4. Configure cgit (/etc/cgitrc).
    css=/cgit/cgit.css
    logo=/cgit/cgit.png
    favicon=/cgit/favicon.ico
    
    enable-index-links=1
    enable-commit-graph=1
    enable-blame=1
    enable-log-filecount=1
    enable-log-linecount=1
    enable-git-config=1
    
    branch-sort=age
    repository-sort=age
    
    clone-url=https://git.example.com/$CGIT_REPO_URL git://git.example.com/$CGIT_REPO_URL ssh://[email protected]:$CGIT_REPO_URL
    
    root-title=hsiao.dev git repositories
    root-desc=mirrors of random projects
    
    ##
    ## List of common mimetypes
    ##
    mimetype.gif=image/gif
    mimetype.html=text/html
    mimetype.jpg=image/jpeg
    mimetype.jpeg=image/jpeg
    mimetype.pdf=application/pdf
    mimetype.png=image/png
    mimetype.svg=image/svg+xml
    
    # Enable syntax highlighting
    source-filter=/usr/lib/cgit/filters/syntax-highlighting.py
    
    # Format markdown, restructuredtext, manpages, text files, and html files
    # through the right converters
    about-filter=/usr/lib/cgit/filters/about-formatting.sh
    
    ##
    ## Search for these files in the root of the default branch of repositories
    ## for coming up with the about page:
    ##
    readme=:README.md
    readme=:readme.md
    readme=:README.mkd
    readme=:readme.mkd
    readme=:README.rst
    readme=:readme.rst
    readme=:README.html
    readme=:readme.html
    readme=:README.htm
    readme=:readme.htm
    readme=:README.txt
    readme=:readme.txt
    readme=:README
    readme=:readme
    readme=:INSTALL.md
    readme=:install.md
    readme=:INSTALL.mkd
    readme=:install.mkd
    readme=:INSTALL.rst
    readme=:install.rst
    readme=:INSTALL.html
    readme=:install.html
    readme=:INSTALL.htm
    readme=:install.htm
    readme=:INSTALL.txt
    readme=:install.txt
    readme=:INSTALL
    readme=:install
    
    robots=noindex, nofollow
    project-list=/home/git/projects.list
    scan-path=/home/git/repositories
    
  5. Add the git site to Caddy2 (/etc/caddy/Caddyfile).
    git.example.com {
            handle_path /cgit* {
                    root * /usr/share/cgit
                    file_server
            }
            handle {
                    cgi * /usr/lib/cgit/cgit.cgi
            }
    }
    

References

Posts from blogs I follow

Look for longevity

Whenever I'm looking at a service, a product or a tool I like to look for longevity or evaluate the potential for it. It's easy to get caught up in the hype around something new but, so often, we fail to evaluate whether it can sustain itself or stick arou…

via Cory Dransfeldt March 15, 2024

Chart the course, set the pace, hold the line

I break the essential responsibilities of the company executive into three distinct buckets. They are:  1. Chart the courseWhere are we going? What are we building? Who is it for? Any executive running anything has to know the answer to these questions in …

via David Heinemeier Hansson March 15, 2024

Achieving awful compression with digits of pi

Compression is a really hard problem, and it attracts a lot of interesting ideas. There are some numbers whose digits contain all sequences of digits1. People have long hypothesized that pi is one such number; a proof remains elusive. If we have a number w…

via ntietz.com blog March 14, 2024

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