Hosting Git Repos With a Web Frontend

Hosting your git repositories yourself is as simple as git init --bare (or git clone --bare for existing repos) in a directory on your server, and then adding the remote to your local repo: git remote add myServer ssh://me@server.address/path/to/repo/project.git.

Having your repos on GitHub too makes for a nice redundancy (or on any other git server), and a remote on your server, on GitHub and a local copy makes for three redundancies. You can push to multiple remotes by adding a few lines in your project’s git config.

In your local copy of the repo, edit .git/config and add a new block:

[remote "all"]
    url = ssh://me@server.address/path/to/repo/project.git
    url = git@github.com:me/project

That would be the url for your server and for GitHub’s. And so now when you’re ready to push, git push all <branch_name> will push your changes to both repositories. It should be noted that you can name this remote whatever you want.

Installing GitList for a Git Web Interface (and Troubleshooting)

(Using Nginx server on Debian 9)

For a nice way to show your code and commits much like GitHub does, there are many git web interfaces out there, but I chose GitList because it looked pretty good and seemed pretty easy to set up.

I used Nginx for my server, so I followed GitList’s INSTALL.md instructions for Nginx, copying their provided configuration.
Here are some issues I encountered and their solutions:

Getting a 500 error when trying to view repos:

Assuming you’re using php-fpm, you’ll need to note the address in GitList’s Nginx config, within the php location block, listed as fastcgi_pass:

location ~ ^/index.php.$ {
    fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
}

Then open /etc/php/7.0/fpm/pool.d/www.conf and find the line listen = /run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock; here you’re going to change the listed socket to the address in our Nginx location block above so that it reads as: listen = 127.0.0.1:9000.

After restarting php-fpm, you should no longer receive a 500 error when viewing repos.

Getting blank screen (500 error) when trying to view commits:

This error persisted for a bit longer than the above for me, but looking at the error log (always check the error log!), I noticed this:

FastCGI sent in stderr: “PHP message: PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught Error: Class ‘SimpleXmlIterator’ not found in /var/www/gitlist/vendor/klaussilveira/gitter/lib/Gitter/PrettyFormat.php:22

Searching for ‘SimpleXmlIterator’ not found online lead me to find that I needed to install php7.0-xml, which I was able to do with apt-get, which solved the issue.