User git Repositories

There's now an instance of cgit available for all users to enjoy. Unlike the previous git repo hosting platform I used, this does not require an additional signup. It's available directly from your home directory. Tagged versions are automatically bundled into .tar.gz archives and listed on the summary page.

All repos can be viewed at https://git.tilde.institute

Note: If a change doesn't appear in cgit immediately, wait a few minutes. The cache will time out.

Creating the directory

New users will not have to do this step. A ~/public_repos link will exist in your home directory. If you were a user before this was set up (2020 May 1), you will need to create a symlink in your home directory pointing into location in the httpd chroot where cgit will scan for your repos.

There should be a directory corresponding to your username at the following location:

/var/www/cgit_repos/<USER>

Issue this command to create the symlink:

ln -s /var/www/cgit_repos/$USER ~/public_repos

Adding a repository

Once ~/public_repos exists, cd into it and create a directory for your repo:

mkdir foo.git

Change into that directory and initialize a bare repo:

cd foo.git; git init --bare

Now that the bare repo has been created, we'll need to set some configuration options. You may use this command from within the directory you just created:

git config --local gitweb.owner "$USER <$USER@tilde.institute>"

Or, you may manually edit the file called config and append the following section:

[gitweb]
    owner = user_name <user_name@tilde.institute>

Then, write out the text description of your repo into a file called description:

echo "My awesome repo!" > description

Setting up the remote

If pushing from your home computer, add the following remote, replacing <USER> with your username at tilde.institute, and <REPO> with the repo directory:

git remote add tilde.institute <USER>@tilde.institute:public_repos/<REPO>

If pushing from your home directory on tilde.institute, use this format:

git remote add tilde.institute /home/<USER>/public_repos/<REPO>

Now it's time to push to the repo you set up:

git push -u tilde.institute master

Checking the repo on git.tilde.institute

Your repo should now be available at https://git.tilde.institute/<USER>/<REPO>, without the .git extension on the repo's directory.

If something's wrong, double-check everything, and then jump into #institute on IRC.

What about pull requests?

These don't exist. I suggest directing people to use git send-email for patches.

Namespacing projects

cgit will use the directory structure to namespace projects, if you want to group related repositories.

For example, say you have a project called widget, which comprises the two repos libwidget and widget-cli. One way to present this here would be to use the following directory structure in ~/public_repos

~/public_repos/widget
~/public_repos/widget/libwidget.git
~/public_repos/widget/widget-cli.git

This will then show up in cgit as:

$USER
  widget/libwidget
  widget/widget-cli

When setting up the remote in your local copy of the repo, you would use this for the libwidget example:

git remote add tilde.institute <USER>@tilde.institute:public_repos/widget/libwidget.git

Misc

You can link to just your own repos via https://git.tilde.institute/<USER>

The following files will be parsed into an about page for a given repo, in order:

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