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

• Arch Wiki
• Git Book
• Gitolite
• Ubuntu Gitolite Docs
• Install Caddy as Linux Service