Introduction

Git comes with a CGI script called GitWeb, a simple web-based visualizer. Today we will set up a virtual server on DigitalOcean that will use GitWeb to visualize a Git repository.

1. Create a DigitalOcean droplet

Create a new droplet from the DigitalOcean dashboard. For now, we go with the smallest virtual server currently available. We also add an SSH key so we can authenticate without a password.

2. Log in to the droplet remotely

After the droplet is created, we can see its IP address on the dashboard. We use this IP address to log in to our virtual server:

$ ssh root@XX.XX.XXX.XXX

3. Silence locale warnings

After successfully logging in, one of the messages we are greeted with is a warning about the locale.

-bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (en_US.UTF-8)

We can make this annoying message go away by creating a locale file manually:

# localedef -i en_US -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8

4. Add a user account to administer the Git repositories

Next, we create a user account that will administer the git repositories, so we don’t always have to do it as root.

# adduser git --disabled-password

We have to add our SSH key to the git user’s authorized_keys file.

# su git
$ cd
$ mkdir .ssh && chmod 700 .ssh
$ touch .ssh/authorized_keys && chmod 600 .ssh/authorized_keys
$ exit
# cat ~/.ssh/authorized_keys >> /home/git/.ssh/authorized_keys

5. Install necessary packages

Lighttpd is the default web server that GitWeb tries to use if available. For simplicity, that’s what we’ll use.

# apt-get update
# apt-get install git lighttpd gitweb

6. Configure Lighttpd

We will need to make some changes to Lighttpd’s config file.

# nano /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

1. Update the value for server.document-root:

   server.document-root = "/usr/share/gitweb"

2. Add index.cgi to index-file.names:

   index-file.names = ( "index.php", "index.html", "index.cgi" )

7. Enable Lighttpd modules

Since GitWeb uses CGI, we will have to enable Lighttpd’s CGI module. We will also need the setenv module. First we need to configure them.

# nano /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/05-setenv.conf

Add the following line:

...
setenv.add-environment = ( "PATH" => env.PATH, "GITWEB_CONFIG" => env.GITWEB_CONFIG )

Next, edit the CGI module config file.

# nano /etc/lighttpd/conf-available/10-cgi.conf

Add:

...
cgi.assign = (
  ".cgi" => ""
)

Once that’s done, enable mod_cgi and mod_setenv with:

# lighty-enable-mod cgi setenv
# service lighttpd force-reload

8. Edit the Lighttpd service init files

We need to edit the Lighttpd service startup files to define the GITWEB_CONFIG environment variable that we used in the previous step.

# systemctl edit lighttpd.service

This will start up an editor and create an override.conf file. Add the following two lines:

[Service]
Environment="GITWEB_CONFIG=./gitweb_config.perl"

Then, save the file and exit the editor. To finish, we need to run these two commands:

# systemctl daemon-reload
# service lighttpd restart

9. Upload a Git repository

We are now ready to upload a Git respository we wish to visualize with our server. First, lets transfer ownership of the respository directory to our user git we created earlier.

# chown git /var/lib/git/
# chgrp git /var/lib/git/

Now we can log out of the server with exit. On our local machine, we clone a bare copy of the repo we want to upload.

$ git clone --bare my_project my_project.git

Now we can upload this bare repo to our server.

$ scp -r my_project.git git@XX.XX.XXX.XXX:/var/lib/git

We can tell Git to automatically add group write permissions to our repo with:

$ ssh git@XX.XX.XXX.XXX
$ cd /var/lib/git/my_project.git
$ git init --bare --shared

10. Visit the GitWeb server

When we visit the server’s IP address with our browser, http://XX.XX.XXX.XXX, we should see a GitWeb projects page. We can now explore our project’s code with our web browser.

Resources

Here is a list of the resources that were used to figure out how to accomplish the task in this post.

• Git Documentation Book - Chapter 4: Git on the Server
• Lighttpd Configuration Tutorial
• LinuxQuestions.org - Perl CGI:Can’t locate CGI.pm
• Nicketa’s GitHub Gist - LC_CTYPE.md