---
title: 007-git-coding
---

# 007-git-coding

Fri Sept 24, 2021

git(1) is one of my favorite tools. All good tilde's should host it!
After all, tilde's are for sharing and what better way to share than
publishing your code!

Git Hosting
-----------
Out of the box, git supports hosting for users with accounts via ssh.
You can clone like so:

	user@host:path/relative/to/home
or:

	user@host:/abs/path/on/host

For anonymous access, git-daemon(1) can be configured to serve over
the git:// protocol. On OpenBSD, enable and start it with the path
to the directories to serve:

	$ rcctl enable gitdaemon
	$ rcctl set gitdaemon flags "--base-path=/var/git"
	$ rcctl start gitdaemon

The last bit of the puzzle is of course the shared git layout! For
git-daemon to work, we need all users to put their files under the
same dir (/var/git). But, we want to prevent accidental clobbering
via stray rm -rf, so we make a directory for each user and chown
it to their account so soley they can access it:

	/var/git/alex
		.../www
		.../config
	/var/git/anthony
		...

Then, for easy clone URLs, we ln(1) the dir into the home directory:

	ln -s /var/git/$USER /home/$USER/git

Now they can clone via $USER@garbash.com:git/REPO

Web Hosting
-----------
git hosting is one thing, but these days everyone likes to show off
their code in the browser for onlookers. Enter stagit(1).

I tried cgit(1), one of the more popular git-frontends, but with httpd(8)'s
chroot(8)-ing, it was kind of a pain to get the more advanced features.

stagit(1) generates static HTML for individual repos, which is a nice
balance of flexible and lightweight.

The hardest part here was that I had to hack stagit(1) and stagit-index(1)
to support our two-tiered directory layout (by default it only supports
single directory layouts). This turned out to be not _that_ hard. See
my fork [1] for the specifics.

These HTML files are then generated on-the-fly at push time via git-hooks,
specifically a post-receive hook.

The whole process requires quite a bit of setup at repo-creation time
(assigning ownership, description, clone-url, and the post-receive hook),
so I rolled it all into a script globally available to our users: `newrepo`.
That too is available via the system config files [2]. Give it a look!


[1]: https://git.alexkarle.com/garbash-stagit/
[2]: https://git.alexkarle.com/garbash-config/