How to self published your code with Git over http

Introduction¶

Today i want to publish my scripts. Few days ago, I decided to use Git to release them. But it's only visible by me on my servers.So i decided to use Viewgit, a web interface in php. It's cool! Now, i can see my scripts with my browser! But in fact, I'm unhappy because nobody is able to use git mechanism like “git clone”. So, I want to use “git over http”, with git-http-backend.

For this environment, I use Nginx web server over Debian to serve files.

Viewgit¶

The installation of viewgit is pretty easy, just download, untar and play. You must drop your git projects, in “projects” directory, like me :

/var/www/viewgit/projects

And declare your projects in /var/www/viewgit/inc/localconfig.php

Your nginx config looks like this at this time :

vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/viewgit

server {
    listen 10.0.0.6:80;
    root /var/www/viewgit;
    index index.php;
    server_name git.d2france.fr;
    location ~ \\.php$ {
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9001;
    }
}

Git over http¶

Before using git over http, you need to know two fundamentals. First, you want to allow people to download your projects, and second, you want to allow people to make modifications on your projects.

To play around git clone, fetch and pull requests, git uses http.uploadpack service.

To play around git push, git uses http.receivepack service.

To provide those services, your need to use GIT-HTTP-BACKEND as a backend cgi script for your web server and nginx cgi server (fcgiwrap) to run it.

apt-get install git-http-backend fcgiwrap

With Nginx, the configuration could be like this :

server {
    listen 10.0.0.6:80;
    root /var/www/viewgit;
    index index.php;
    server_name git.d2france.fr;
    location ~ \\.php$ {
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9001;
    }
    location ~ ^projects/.*/(HEAD|info/refs|objects/info/.*|git-upload-pack)$ {
        root /var/www/viewgit/projects;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME   /usr/lib/git-core/git-http-backend;
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO         $uri;
        fastcgi_param GIT_PROJECT_ROOT  /var/www/viewgit/projects;
        fastcgi_param GIT_HTTP_EXPORT_ALL \"\";
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/fcgiwrap.socket;
    }
}

Here, i just want to share my scripts. So, I only allow git-upload-pack requests

It works!¶

Now you can clone your git repositories with this command:

git clone http://server/projects/foobar

As you can see, on each project in viewgit you can't add any information like the url of your git. A friend made a plugin for that. You should find his work at viewgit-projectinfos-plugin.

This article on my blog.