gitten

Gitten

Gitten is a self-hosted, read-only, light-weight Git frontend designed to showcase personal projects.

Building

You will need a recent version of the Rust toolchain.

Run the following command in the repository root:

cargo build --release

The Gitten binary will be at ./target/release/gitten.

Installing

Gitten is designed to be run as a local service behind a real HTTP server, such as apache or nginx. Configuring this is out of the scope of this document, but if you don't know where to start, look up how to set up a reverse proxy with your chosen web server.

1: Create folder structure

First, create a folder at /opt/gitten. You can create it somewhere else, but you will need to edit the systemd service file if you do this. Create the following folder structure inside:

/opt/gitten
    /bin
    /lib
        /systemd
            /system
    /templates
    /static

2: Copy files

Copy the following files from the repository into the folder structure you just created:

• target/release/gitten goes into /opt/gitten/bin
• server/lib/systemd/system/gitten.service goes into /opt/gitten/lib/systemd/system
• All the files in templates go into /opt/gitten/templates
• All the files in static go into /opt/gitten/static
• server/gitten.example.toml goes into /opt/gitten (rename this to gitten.toml)

3: Configure the Gitten service

Edit gitten.toml. The contents will be specific to your machine, but in particular:

• The git.root parameter must be set to the path to the folder where your Git repositories are
• The network.host and network.port parameters should be set to match the reverse proxy settings you configured in your web server
• The site.name parameter controls what Gitten will put in the browser's title bar and in the site header
• The site.link parameter controls where the link in the site header will lead

4: Add the service to systemd

Create a symbolic link from /etc/systemd/system/gitten.service to /opt/gitten/lib/systemd/system/gitten.service.

5: Check ownership and permissions

Gitten needs to be able to read your Git repositories in order to query their contents and render them in the browser. The default configuration assumes you have a user and group named git that can read everything under the git.root you configured in gitten.toml. Either create this user and set the ownership of your repositories appropriately, or change the User= and Group= settings in gitten.service to the user and group you want to use instead.

6: Start the Gitten service

Run these commands:

systemctl start gitten
systemctl status gitten

If all is well, you should see the string active (running) in the output of the status command.