REPOWEB

Repoweb is a simple way to manage a collection of static websites checked into Gitlab but served from another machine.

For example you may have a nginx or apache web server with a number of virtual host directives each pointing to the working directory of an individiual git repo; however, you might also have the the upstream version of these repos hosted on an external gitserver à la gitlab. Repoweb enables you to simply setup a git hook, that is called upon a push event that will update the local repositories to match origin/master without you having to log on to the webserver and manually checkout the changes.

Installation and Configuration

Download or build the binary and edit the config.toml to match your setup. For example:

[[website]]
name = "my-fancy-git-website"
worktree = "/srv/fancy"
gitdir = "/home/git/fancy-website.git"
token = "jJwixrBLuBfpZegsZYoNRKFvRd9HTzfDGQic3J8WO5XoNeXqyllT4CBKqyt5EWJe"

• name is the unique identifier that is exposed by the webhook.
• worktree is the the webroot for a virtualhost. This location must be writable by the the user that repoweb is run under.
• gitdir is the location of the bare git directory for the repository. It should also be writable.
• token is checked against the X-Gitlab-Token sent in the hook request headers to verify that the request is legitimate.

You may add as many [[website]] blocks to config.toml as you want.

Configuration Details

The recomended setup is to have a working tree seprate from your gitdir stored to avoid leaking the contents of .git to the web. You can do this easily by cloning the bare repository with git clone --bare http://<gitlabserver>/<user>/<my-site>.git <my-site>.git this cloned path is what you will specify for gitdir. Please note that any changes you make in the work tree will be overwritten unless upon the next update so make sure that you do not edit the work tree directly.

You must also ensure that the user that runs repoweb has a ssh key that corresponds to a user on gitlab with at least read access to the remote repository. Instructions for setting up an ssh key for a user can easily be found by googling.

Finally you must add the webhook to github. It will be of the form http://<servername>:<port>/update/my-fancy-git-website.

You may also want to add a system service to start repoweb as the desired user automatically on boot.

Build

You may simply run go build; however to crosscompile and optimize the resulting size of the binaries you will need to download upx and place it in the root of the repository and then run make -j 2.

Roadmap

• git pull to a directory outside of the webroot and then use mv to atomically switch to the new version
• Enable running post-pull scripts to run inside of a chroot or restricted shell
• Support git lfs?
• Track custom branches