Self-hosted git

As part of using only free software, I also started thinking about the various non-free services I am dependent upon. One of those I had already started working on replacing was Github. Github is currently the canonical source location for a lot of my various projects, including some that aren't even on my laptops.

So, alternatives. First I considered a hosted service that runs free software, but those don't really exist any more. Gitorious has shut down, and it turns out that GitLab has gone open core.

Alright then, self-hosted git it is. I tried out and evaluated two projects: cgit and gogs.

cgit is a web viewer for git repositories written in C. I like the UI, having used it while browsing Fedora and Linux kernel repositories. The basic set up of it was pretty simple, I downloaded and unzipped it, set up some Apache CGI rules, and bam, it was running. I imported 2 git repositories, and they showed up right away. I started trying to enable some other features like syntax highlighting, and that's where it stopped being easy to work with. I tried both Pygments and a Perl highlighter, neither worked. Around this point I got bored and gave up.

gogs is a full blown clone of Github's features written in Go. The UI is extremely similar to Github, so it was very easy to figure out. Set up was a little tricky, I had to create a "git" user for it to run as, and then fiddle with setting up an Apache proxy rule so /git proxies to localhost:3000 (I originally started out in a sub-path instead of a full sub-domain). After that, I was able to import a few Github repos directly, and clone them. Yay! It also has a mirror feature that can synchronize with an external repository every hour. I found a gogs-migrate tool that claimed to set up mirrors of all your Github repos in a gogs installation, but I couldn't get it to work. I ended up writing my own Python version called gogs-mirror. And for bonus points, I submitted an upstream pull request to improve an interface message.

Currently I have gogs running at git.legoktm.com. All of my non-forked Github repos are mirrored there, and it also is the canonical source of gogs-mirror. The next step will be to switch the mirroring, so that the canonical source lives on git.legoktm.com, and Github is a mirror. I'll also want to update links to those repositories on places like PyPI, various wikis, etc. More to come!