Selfhosting a git GUI server

All good things must come to an end. The carefree childhood, that one ramen you used to buy but they don't make anymore. So did github - over the time it turned from a developer-first platform with great QoL things like CI/CD through actions and web-based merge conflict resolution to AI trashcan that dies way too often for a glorified SSH file storage (saw a screenshot recently - they are barely holding on a single 9 in service uptime) and charges you to give them your code to train the worst agent on market . I have had enough of this a long time ago but only recently found time to host something personal to replace it.

Well, not exactly. The old PC I plugged into internet permanently has served me my bare repositories for more than half a year now but it wasn't particularly easy to use. The main issue was that you would have to SSH into the server to watch the repository list. The other issue was that I couldn't watch my commit history without cloning it and typing git log. Despite that, I kept using it alongside github until I noticed that I didn't want to use my git anymore due to pure inconvenience. That's when I decided to stop being lazy and host something.

The many routes

While doing research I encountered a couple of many modern contenders:

Out of presented options Gitea is a clear winner for my insane 8gb server. So naturally I chose CGit.

CGit

Gitea is great when you want to own a fully featured system many users can use. Thing is, no one cares about my personal git, so why would I waste computational power on something not a living soul would use? CGit was an obvious winner - lightweight, minimalistic and customizable alternative. The only issue is that documentation for it is a disaster.

My server runs arch linux (btw). Naturally, the first thing I do after checking out their repo is googling 'cgit arch' and get this page. . The order of execution is quite convoluted in the article. First it tells you to download cgit, then choose a web server, then download a wrapper, then configure CGit itself. I always use Nginx the first opportunity I get so I jump to its configuration. The second fun part is that it doesn't work out of the box. The instructions are wrong - you have to search for the files to feed it to cgi-bin (yes, it's that breed of software) and add them manually. Also they forgot the path to the static files so you have to find add it yourself. All in all, I got this config:

worker_processes 1; # Load all installed modules include modules.d/*.conf; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { include mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; sendfile on; keepalive_timeout 65; server { listen [internal port]; root /usr/share/cgit; try_files $uri @cgit; # This has to ba added and altered to use static files location ~* ^/(cgit.(css|png|js|svg)|favicon.ico|robots.txt|cgit_bak.css|(switch|search).svg) { root /usr/share/webapps/cgit; expires 30d; } location ~ /.+/(info/refs|git-upload-pack) { include fastcgi_params; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/lib/git-core/git-http-backend; fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $uri; fastcgi_param GIT_HTTP_EXPORT_ALL 1; fastcgi_param GIT_PROJECT_ROOT /srv/git; fastcgi_param HOME /srv/git; fastcgi_pass unix:/run/fcgiwrap.sock; } location @cgit { include fastcgi_params; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/lib/cgit/cgit.cgi; fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $uri; fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $args; fastcgi_param HTTP_HOST $server_name; fastcgi_pass unix:/run/fcgiwrap.sock; } } }

After that it required a config file that was relatively easy to write (somehow `man cgit` is good despite the rest having close to no documentation) and after an hour of tinkering it finally came alive. The next logical thing was to customize it.
The customization is fairly straightforward - you just create a single CSS file and replace the default one with it. By default cgit looks for the static files in /usr/share/webapps/cgit (good luck finding that) and if you put files there it will gladly eat it up. The default CSS provided by CGIT is also there. I spent an evening trying to make it look like my website and while I'm not too happy about the result it will do. The configuration for the server you can find here

Afterthoughts

At the time of the writing 10 days have passed. By this time according to my meter I've successfully surpassed microsoft's uptime (around 97% vs 91% at GitHub). I understand that it might not be a valid comparison due to the lack of features and users at my server but the fact that I'm in charge of what happens and when my server is online comforts me. I can also access it locally if I would ever need to. So far nothing has bothered me, every time I push it gladly accepts my code and I don't have to wait for like 20 minutes to push changes (actual situation I found myself recently into). So yeah, if you have a spare server you should absolutely look into doing the same. I am not that delusional and I understand that not everyone can easily pull this off so I won't propagate selfhosting here but if you were doubting about it selfhosting your infrastructure as an independent person is 100% worth it.