gitweb - a GitHub/GitLab alternative

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+---
+title: "gitweb - a GitHub/GitLab alternative"
+date: 2022-03-24T01:29:37-04:00
+tags: ["git", "development", "dev tools", "gitweb"]
+draft: false
+---
+
+## Owning Your Digital Space
+Over the last year or so I've slowly pushed further and further into the idea of
+owning your digital space. Part of that has been re-evaluating all of the
+services online that I think of as "necessary". One of these such services has
+been GitHub. 
+
+The more I dive into development processes the more I find that they are all
+centered around the idea that in order for you to be a "developer" it mostly
+requires that you buy into the idea of centralized forges like GitHub/GitLab.
+But these very ideas make it harder and harder to actually get work done. All
+development over the last few years has been about dealing with changes that
+GitHub has brought about. Don't get me wrong - GitHub really does have some
+wonderful services and they've done a lot for visibility and getting people
+involved in OS projects. 
+
+But they definitely shouldn't be the only game in town.
+
+In an attempt to take some control back from the major forges, I've been
+experimenting with a small tool called gitweb.
+
+## gitweb
+gitweb is a very simple tool - it allows you to browse all the git repositories
+within a specified folder. You simply install gitweb, point nginx over to it,
+and edit a single configuration file. You immediately get  
+- A browser for all local git projects
+- A tree view for your repos with raw file previews
+- Commit history w/ colorized diffs
+- Snapshot downloads
+- RSS feed tracking commit history
+- Search (with regex) throughout your repos
+
+For personal projects, or even for small collaborative projects gitweb provides
+more than enough functionality.
+
+The two features that I think are missing from gitweb are Issue Tracking and 
+Merge Requests. I don't think these are necessarily features that have any place
+in gitweb itself, but it means as a replacement for a centralized forge today,
+you probably need to rely on additional tooling.
+
+
+## Setting up gitweb
+Actually setting up gitweb was surprisingly easy. 
+
+### Installing gitweb
+```bash
+sudo apt install gitweb
+```
+
+### Configuring gitweb
+The gitweb configuration file is located at `/etc/gitweb.conf`. Installing
+gitweb automatically populates this file with some of the defaults. It's a very tiny
+file and honestly you don't need to touch most of it to get going. The only
+thing that's required is setting the `$projectroot`.
+
+```inf
+$projectroot = "/path/to/gitfolders";
+```
+
+### Configuring nginx
+Most of the tutorials about getting gitweb going seem to be primarily apache
+related. I haven't personally used apache in close to 10 years now - mostly
+living in nginx land. Here's a very short snippet to get your nginx config going
+to actually serve gitweb.
+
+```nginx
+server {
+  server_name git.xangelo.ca;
+  location /index.cgi {
+    root /usr/share/gitweb/;
+    include fastcgi_params;
+    gzip off;
+    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME $uri;
+    fastcgi_param GITWEB_CONFIG /etc/gitweb.conf;
+    fastcgi_pass  unix:/var/run/fcgiwrap.socket;
+  }
+
+  location / {
+    root /usr/share/gitweb/;
+    index index.cgi;
+  }
+}
+```
+All the paths included are the default locations of things gitweb configures.
+The entire block should work for you if you just change the `server_name`
+directive.
+
+## Further Customizing
+Unfortunately not all the configuration options are specified in the
+configuration file that's generated. Reading the source will get you a list
+pretty quick but if you don't feel like it, here's a few other params I changed
+up.
+
+```inf
+# sets the title in the <title></title> html tag
+$site_name = "My Site";
+
+# by default the root of your gitweb is called "projects". 
+# I simply changed that to Home and explicitly set the url 
+# that users get directed to when they click it
+$home_link_str = "Home";
+$home_link = "https://git.xangelo.ca";
+
+# There's a small "Header" section above the project listing 
+# that you can customize with whatever text you want. This 
+# allows you to specify an html  file that should be used 
+# in that area
+$home_text = "/path/to/file.html";
+
+# since all of these repos are mine, I don't list the owner
+# so I've disabled this prop
+$omit_owner = "1";
+```
+
+## Resources
+- Git Docs: https://git-scm.com/docs/gitweb.html
+- Gitweb Source: https://repo.or.cz/w/git.git/tree/HEAD:/gitweb/
+- My projects: https://git.xangelo.ca