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Web_Interface_using_Gitweb.mdwn

On the gitolite side, you enable repositories to be served via the web interface by doing one of these:

1. Give read permission to the special user ‘gitweb’
2. Add a gitweb config line to gitolite.conf

The second option allows you to specify a description and an owner for the repository, so let’s use that. For example, let’s enable the cool-project repository to appear on the web interface and give it a description. We just need to add the following line somewhere in gitolite.conf:

cool-project = "A very cool project"

We can also add an owner:

cool-project "Alice Sandler" = "A very cool project"

gitolite.conf now may look like this:

repo    gitolite-admin
        RW+     =   alice

repo    cool-project
        RW+     =   alice h4ck3r
        R       =   daemon

cool-project = "A very cool project"

Of course the change must be committed and pushed to take effect.

Now, that was just the gitolite side. We still need a webserver to serve the web pages, and Gitweb itself to generate them from the repository information. So the steps left are:

1. Install packages
2. Configure gitweb
3. Configure the web server

We’ll use lighttpd as the webserver. Alternatively you may prefer Nginx or Apache or something else. If you do, check their documentation to see how to configure them. Gitweb comes with a config file for Apache, but I’m not sure it works (if it does, it definitely saves you the step of configuring the server).

Assume your website name is mysite.org. Later we’ll see what to do for I2P. Git browsing will be available at git.mysite.org.

Let’s start by installing packages. Run this as root:

# apt-get install lighttpd gitweb highlight

After this, browsing to your server using a web browser should load the default page provided by Debian. It will suggest that you replace it. If you already had a website you won’t see that page of course. Anyway, we’re going to add the gitweb interface there.

Now let’s configure Gitweb. We need to tell it where to look for the repositories and give it a list of repositories to serve. By default it just serves everything it finds, but we will let gitolite.conf control what gitweb serves by making gitweb use the project list generated by gitolite. Here’s what the config file should look like after installation:

# path to git projects (<project>.git)
$projectroot = "/var/cache/git";

# directory to use for temp files
$git_temp = "/tmp";

# target of the home link on top of all pages
#$home_link = $my_uri || "/";

# html text to include at home page
#$home_text = "indextext.html";

# file with project list; by default, simply scan the projectroot dir.
#$projects_list = $projectroot;

# stylesheet to use
#@stylesheets = ("static/gitweb.css");

# javascript code for gitweb
#$javascript = "static/gitweb.js";

# logo to use
#$logo = "static/git-logo.png";

# the 'favicon'
#$favicon = "static/git-favicon.png";

# git-diff-tree(1) options to use for generated patches
#@diff_opts = ("-M");
@diff_opts = ();

Now, here’s our updated file. See man gitweb.conf for full documentation of what can be set in the configuration file.

################ directories ###############################################

## path to git projects (<project>.git)
#$projectroot = "/var/cache/git";
$projectroot = "/home/git/repositories";

# directory to use for temp files
$git_temp = "/tmp";

################ access control ############################################

## file with project list; by default, simply scan the projectroot dir.
#$projects_list = $projectroot;
## use the list generated by gitolite
$projects_list = "/home/git/projects.list";

## a repository will be accessed by gitweb only if it contains this file
## this is the same file used by git-daemon, to help prevent mistakes
$export_ok = "git-daemon-export-ok";

## choose whether access control controls what appears in the overview, or
## also controls what can be accessed at all, i.e. only allow viewing
## repositories which are also shown in the overview
$strict_export = "true";

################ links and their targets ###################################

## stylesheets to use
@stylesheets = ("static/gitweb.css");

## logo to use
$logo = "static/git-logo.png";

## the 'favicon'
$favicon = "static/git-favicon.png";

## target of the home link on top of all pages
#$my_uri = "http://git.mysite.org";

## label for the home link
$home_link_str = "Projects";

## where the logo image links
$logo_url = "http://www.mysite.org";

## label for the logo image
$logo_label = "MySite";

################ look ######################################################

## site name to appear in page titles
$site_name = "MySite Git Repositories";

## name of HTML file to be included at the top of each page
#$site_header =

## name of HTML file to be included at the bottom of each page
#$site_footer =

## name of HTML file to be included in the projects overview
#$home_text = "$projectroot/indextext.html";

## width of the description column in the overview
$projects_list_description_width = 25;

################ other features and policies ###############################

## list of base URLs which can be used for cloning repositories
@git_base_url_list = ('git://git.mysite.org',
                      'ssh://git@git.mysite.org',
                      'http://git.mysite.org');

## whether to enable categories in the overview
$projects_list_group_categories = "true";

## disable some potentially CPU-intensive features
$feature{'blame'}{'default'} = [undef];
$feature{'grep'}{'default'} = [undef];
$feature{'pickaxe'}{'default'} = [undef];
$feature{'search'}{'default'} = [undef];

## enable features
$feature{'highlight'}{'default'} = [1];

## git-diff-tree(1) options to use for generated patches
#@diff_opts = ("-M");
@diff_opts = ();

Gitweb is now ready to use, but our webserver doesn’t know about it yet. We need to have a link or a path on the website which leads to the Gitweb interface, and we need to make sure the webserver is able to serve Gitweb’s perl module (since it’s not plain static HTML).

Before that, one more thing: The webserver can’t read any git content without read access. We need to add the webserver user to the git group, like we did for gitdaemon. The default server username is ‘www-data’ so this command should give the permissions, run as root:

# adduser www-data git

Time to configure the webserver and we’re done. There are many possible configurations depending on your specific setup and what else your server does, so we’ll do one possible setup: a website at mysite.org and the gitweb interface at git.mysite.org.

The first thing we’ll do is review the initial server setup. This is what Debian comes with:

server.modules = (
        "mod_access",
        "mod_alias",
        "mod_compress",
        "mod_redirect",
#       "mod_rewrite",
)

server.document-root        = "/var/www"
server.upload-dirs          = ( "/var/cache/lighttpd/uploads" )
server.errorlog             = "/var/log/lighttpd/error.log"
server.pid-file             = "/var/run/lighttpd.pid"
server.username             = "www-data"
server.groupname            = "www-data"
server.port                 = 80


index-file.names            = ( "index.php", "index.html", "index.lighttpd.html" )
url.access-deny             = ( "~", ".inc" )
static-file.exclude-extensions = ( ".php", ".pl", ".fcgi" )

compress.cache-dir          = "/var/cache/lighttpd/compress/"
compress.filetype           = ( "application/javascript", "text/css", "text/html", "text/plain" )

# default listening port for IPv6 falls back to the IPv4 port
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/use-ipv6.pl " + server.port
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/create-mime.assign.pl"
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/include-conf-enabled.pl"

This is much shorter than the sample files provided by lighttpd, but it also has no comments to explain what’s going on. Let’s add comments and add the gitweb host:

## core modules used by the server
## mod_access: deny access to files with specific extensions (e.g. backup files)
## mod_alias: specify special document root for a url subset
## mod_compress: compress static content to reduce network load
## mod_redirect: redirect a set of URLs externally
server.modules = (
        "mod_access",
        "mod_alias",
        "mod_compress",
        "mod_redirect",
#       "mod_rewrite",
)

## basic setup
server.document-root        = "/var/www"
server.upload-dirs          = ( "/var/cache/lighttpd/uploads" )
server.errorlog             = "/var/log/lighttpd/error.log"
server.pid-file             = "/var/run/lighttpd.pid"
server.username             = "www-data"
server.groupname            = "www-data"
server.port                 = 80

## filenames to be used as directory index
index-file.names            = ( "index.cgi", "index.html" )

## deny access to some files by pattern
url.access-deny             = ( "~", ".inc" )

## avoid serving dynamic content generators as static content
static-file.exclude-extensions = ( ".php", ".pl", ".fcgi" )

## directory to use for caching compressed content
compress.cache-dir          = "/var/cache/lighttpd/compress/"

## which file types to compress
compress.filetype           = ( "application/javascript", "text/css", "text/html", "text/plain" )

## default listening port for IPv6 falls back to the IPv4 port
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/use-ipv6.pl " + server.port

## create mime types
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/create-mime.assign.pl"

## enable the modules enabled via `lighty-enable-mod` (the conf-enabled folder)
include_shell "/usr/share/lighttpd/include-conf-enabled.pl"

## gitweb host
$HTTP["host"] == "git.mysite.org" {
    server.document-root = "/usr/share/gitweb"
    cgi.assign = (
        ".cgi" => "/usr/bin/perl"
    )
}

Now run this as root to enable CGI:

# lighty-enable-mod cgi

Done.

How to set a local setup: If you have a domain name, you can use it easily. For example, make sure mysite.org loads the website while git.mysite.org loads the gitweb interface. If you don’t, you’ll use localhost or 127.0.0.1 to browse the local server, but you need to somehow tell the server how to use the gitweb host. In general, you need a way to pass a “fake” host, and use that host as the gitweb host in the configuration above. Then localhost will take you to the website and the fake host will take you to the gitweb interface.

For me, a very simple setup worked: I set the gitweb host to ‘localhost’, and then 127.0.0.1 took me to the website while localhost took me to gitweb. I don’t know what happens if you have more virtual hosts on your machine, but for the configuration described above it’s an easy way to test what we did so far.