gong

gong

gong is a web git repository viewer written in Go intended to replace cgit for my personal use case. I've licensed it under the AGPLv3.

Building

This is a little messy at the moment. Dependencies are currently highlight.js, go-ini, blackfriday, and git2go (libgit2 bindings for Go).

For go-ini and blackfriday, you can simply go get github.com/go-ini/ini and github.com/russross/blackfriday respectively, but for git2go, you'll need to go get github.com/libgit2/git2go and then checkout the branch corresponding to your system's libgit2 version in the cloned repository. For example, since I have libgit2 version 0.24 installed, I checked out $GOPATH/src/github.com/libgit2/git2go to the v24 branch.

Once you have the Go dependencies installed, run go build in the gong directory (aka the package for the binary).

To download highlight.js, run the get-highlightjs.sh shell script. If you need to add more languages (the default list is short for performance reasons), you can modify the languages file the script generates and run the script again.

The gong Manifesto

Gripes with Other Tools

Many tools for self-hosting git repositories on the web exist, but none of them perfectly fit my use case.

• GitHub, the "largest host of source code in the world" according to Wikipedia.

  • Nonfree, which disappoints me. Free software deserves free tools.
  • Private repositories cost $$$
  • Hosting your own instance costs an ungodly amount of money ($2,500 a year!)

• Gitlab, a libre alternative to GitHub

  • I've never run it myself honestly, but I've heard it's quite resource-intensive. Like, gigabytes-of-ram-required kind of intensive.

  • Too many dependencies. According to the readme:

    • GNU/Linux
    • Ruby
    • Redis
    • MySQL or PostgreSQL
    • SMTP server

    I just want to display a git repository's files in visitors' browsers, not send them emails or have pull requests or whatever. Having two different databases and an SMTP server is overkill for me.

• gogs, a GitHub clone written in Go

  • Close to what I want (e.g., can use SQLite and no SMTP server required), but still way too much functionality. I don't want logins, pull requests, or databases; I want to display git repositories.

• cgit, a cgi C program that I currently use and like

  • Still uses cgi, which requries a FastCGI wrapper on nginx and other HTTP servers without cgi support
  • Not mobile-friendly
  • Pages still built around tables
  • No templates of any kind, with HTML instead generated by a bunch of printf()s. The developers did a great job of making this not as bad as it sounds, but it still makes even minor HTML changes require a recompile.
  • It's a webapp written in C. Again, it's well-written and I respect the developers, but this disturbs me.

Goals

In essence, provide a minimal, modern Go reboot of cgit for my git repositories.

• Rearrange the minimal UI of cgit such that it resembles GitHub's interface, which non-{cgit,gitweb} users expect. For example, the repository root page should show files and the README
• Be mobile-friendly
• Use templates
• Be fast
• Don't use a database; instead, read configuration from a file like cgit
• Require no write access to git repositories (users should push over SSH instead)
• Run as a daemon supporting FastCGI or HTTP
• Perform markdown rendering in Go instead of firing up a Python/Perl script (blackfriday is good)
• Perform syntax highlighting in Go or client-side with JavaScript instead of exec()ing highlight or another program
• Learn about git!
• Procrastinate