Gitile

Gitile (pronounced /gitil/) is a small git forge written in Guile Scheme. It can currently show public repository contents on a website. Visit this project's repository to have a look at what it can do.

How to Build Gitile

Gitile requires Guile of course, in addition to the following Guile libraries:

• guile-git (for accessing git repositories)
• guile-commonmark (for markdown highlighting)
• guile-syntax-highlight (for other syntax highlighting. Use commit 51727cbb7fc05ef743aab2d7b16314ea1ed790e4, it is more recent than the latest release)
• guile-fibers (for running a multithreaded web server)
• guile-gcrypt (for a hash computation)

You will also need the usual suspects:

• autotools
• make
• pkg-config

From this repository, run the following:

./bootstrap
./configure
make

To install run:

make install

How to Run Gitile?

Before running gitile, you will need a configuration file. The configuration is a record that contains all of the following keys, as in the following example:

;; gitile.conf
(config
  (port 8080)
  (host "localhost")
  (database "")
  (repositories "/srv/git")
  (base-git-url "https://git.example.org/git")
  (index-title "My projects")
  (intro ((p "Content of the intro on index page")))
  (footer ((p "Footer content")))))

• port: the port on which to listen
• host: the host on which to listen
• database: currently unused
• repositories: The directory in which public repositories can be found
• base-git-url: The base url for cloning repositories
• index-title: The title for the index page
• intro: The content of the introduction text on the index page. It is a list of sxml expressions.
• footer: The content of the footer text on all pages. It is also a list of sxml expressions.

Save the file as gitile.conf (or whatever name you like) and run gitile with

./pre-inst-env scripts/gitile -c gitile.conf

It should be running on localhost:8080, but you will not get any assets.

To get assets, you need to have them served, for instance with Nginx acting as a reverse proxy for gitile, and serving the assets directly.

Repository Configuration

In order to show information such as a description, a nice name, and a short summary for each repository, you need to configure it in the repository, with git config. We use the gitweb.* configuration space for that.

• gitweb.description: The long description shown on the index page, it can contain arbitrary html tags.
• gitweb.synopsis: The short summary shown on the project page.
• gitweb.name: The nice name shown on the index page.

For instance, you can set the following on a repository:

cd /srv/git/my-repo
git config --local gitweb.description "My repository is a wonderful project that will <b>conquer</b> the world!"
git config --local gitweb.synopsis "A repo to conquer the world"
git config --local gitweb.name "My Repository"