Home Git Server

I'm a recent convert to git and have been using gitosis to manage my private repositories. This combination works great, but sometimes I want an easy way browsing through my repositories without using a command line. While gitweb makes this easy, it's not entirely trivial on how to combine it with gitosis. To add even more frustration to the mix, I already run Apache for some other development work, so I can't just run lighttpd. I don't want to modify the permissions on my repositories, so just changing the ownership to www-data or giving world read and execute won't do.

Also, I'm not concerned about having an open website of my repositories. My development server is firewalled from the outside world. The only exception to this is the SSH port, which means I can still use gitosis from the outside world in a secure way.

Credits

A lot of the information below was in the gitosis tree, but either I couldn't get it to work or it didn't fit my needs completely. This is my interpretation of the instructions I read. Thanks to Tommi Virtanen for the jumping off point.

Prerequisites

I'm going to assume that you already have gitosis up and running under the git user. I've used this setup almost verbatim. Also, my server is running on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. If you're using something, you will have to adjust appropriately.

Make Gitosis Do Some Of The Dirty Work

Gitosis already does some of the heavy lifting for you. By adding a simple setting to your gitosis.conf file, gitosis will specify the repositories to publish via gitweb, as well as set up some descriptions for each project.

Enter your gitosis-admin directory and edit gitosis.conf. If you haven't done so already, add a repository entry for each of the repositories you want visible on your web server.

[repo my-project]
description = The Best Project in the World
owner = Joe Schmoe

There is one more setting you need, but it can go in one of two places. If you just want every repository to be visible, add the following line to the global gitosis section. Otherwise, for each repository you want visible, add the following.

gitweb = yes

Commit your changes.

Serve Your Repositories With Lighttpd

Lighttpd is the perfect solution if you need a simple web server running as an unprivileged user. On your server, run the following, which will install lighttpd and then force it to not start by default. You may see an error about a port already in use. You can ignore it.

$ sudo apt-get install lighttpd gitweb
$ sudo update-rc.d -f lighttpd remove

Now lets set up a framework for launching lighttpd just for gitweb. First, you will want to change to the git user. Be warned, the git user doesn't use bash as its default shell, so you might lose some of your shortcuts that you are used to.

$ sudo su - git

Now we need to create a couple of directories to house our set up. Once for configurations, one for scripts and another one for lighttpd to use.

$ mkdir etc bin www

Lighttpd needs a custom configuration file to run gitweb. Edit the etc/lighttpd-gitweb.conf file and add the following:

server.port = 5000
server.document-root = "/home/git/www"

server.modules += (
  "mod_cgi",
  "mod_setenv",
  "mod_redirect",
  "mod_alias",
)

## mimetype mapping
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/create-mime.assign.pl"

url.redirect += (
  "^$" => "/",
)

alias.url += (
  "/gitweb.css" => "/var/www/gitweb.css",
  "/git-logo.png" => "/var/www/git-logo.png",
  "/git-favicon.png" => "/var/www/git-favicon.png",
  "/" => "/usr/lib/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi",
)

setenv.add-environment = (
  "GITWEB_CONFIG" => "/home/git/etc/gitweb.conf",
)

cgi.assign = ( ".cgi" => "/usr/bin/perl" )

I'm using port 5000 to run gitweb on. You can change this to what ever you desire. Also note that we are pointing to a custom gitweb.conf file. This config file is what will point to all of the work that gitosis did for us. Edit etc/gitweb.conf and add the following:

do "/etc/gitweb.conf" if -e "/etc/gitweb.conf";

$projects_list = "/home/git/gitosis/projects.list";

$projectroot = "/home/git/repositories";

$export_ok = "";

$strict_export = "true";

@git_base_url_list = ('git://git');

In a nutshell, this config file loads your systems gitweb.conf file, reads the list of repositories from gitosis, points to the location of the repositories and serves them all up.

Lastly, we need to create a start up script for lighttpd. Edit the bin/launch-gitweb file and add the following:

#!/bin/sh

/usr/sbin/lighttpd -D -f /home/git/etc/lighttpd-gitweb.conf

Don't forget to make this executable.

$ chmod +x bin/launch-gitweb

At this point, you can test your progress. Still as the git user, launch the lighttpd process.

$ bin/launch-gitweb

No point your browser to port 5000 of your git server and you should see your repositories. If everything is working, kill lighttpd. Exit back to a user that has sudo privileges. We are going to create a script to launch this lighttpd session automatically when the system starts. Edit the file /etc/event.d/local-git-web and add the following.

start on startup
stop on shutdown

exec su --command="/home/git/bin/launch-gitweb" git
respawn

To make sure this works, run the following. If you access the site like you did above, everything is set up correctly.

$ sudo initctl start local-git-web

Making Apache Point to Lighttpd

Lastly, since typing in the port above is so difficult, we are going to have our existing Apache server point to lighttpd using a VirtualHost. I have a DNS record of git pointed to my development server, so I created /etc/apache2/sites-available/git that looks like the following:

<VirtualHost *>
  ServerName git
    ServerAlias git.example.com

    ProxyRequests Off
    ProxyPreserveHost On
    ProxyPass / http://localhost:5000/
    ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:5000/
</VirtualHost>

Also, you need to modify how proxying works in Apache. Edit the /etc/apache2/mods-available/proxy.conf file. You will need to make two changes. First, change ProxyRequests Off to ProxyRequests On. Next, uncomment the Allow statement and change it to allow your subnet.

Allow 192.168.100.0/24

We need to make a couple other changes to make this all work.

$ sudo a2enmod proxy proxy_connect proxy_http
$ sudo a2ensite git
$ sudo invoke-rc.d apache2 force-reload

You should now be able to hit your repositories without specifying a port. How convenient!

This was posted on Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 10:47. It is filed under GIT and Ubuntu.
It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. View the markdown for this article.