Nat Taylor — Blog, AI, Product Management & Tinkering

Gitweb Setup

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Recently I setup and customized Gitweb (a web frontend to Git repositories) and I’m quite pleased with the result but also found a few quirks.  Here is a screenshot and a summary of my setup.
Gitweb Screenshot
Screenshot of Gitweb with custom theme
The Git book’s Git on the Server page has great instructions for how to generate the .cgi script (including setting the $projectroot path, as well as for configuring .htaccess Gitweb is a CGI script, so you need to enable CGI in the directory and a few other things with the following code: 
Options +ExecCGI +FollowSymLinks +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
        AllowOverride All
        order allow,deny
        Allow from all
        AddHandler cgi-script cgi
        DirectoryIndex gitweb.cgi
At first I got a “No Projects” error, which I resolved by determining the path to git on my server with which git then configuring gitweb.cgi with our $GIT="your/path/to/git" I then choose to put the application on a subdomain and enabled basic authentication, as I plan to keep non-public projects there and I was also concerned about the potential for server load since I didn’t enable any of the caching customization. Lastly, I deployed a kogakure’s Github inspired theme.  This was as simple as replacing three files in gitweb’s static/ folder. If you’re disappointed by the lack of a Markdown renderer, one option is to script a hook that converts into HTML, then Gitweb will display it on the summary page.  For example: 
#!/bin/sh
git cat-file blob HEAD:README.md | php -f markdown.php > $GIT_DIR/README.html

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