Private Git Repository on Any Computer | Hacker News Reader

Private Git Repository on Any Computer

alexkras.com

65 pointsakras1452 comments

It pains me to think that people nowadays need to be reminded that many cloud services were/are originally available locally, for unlimited use. Amazon's whole services model seems to revolve around converting on-prem services into cloud offerings, even.

Modern computing is just like the chemicals industry now. You can clean your whole house with just a few simple ingredients (only one is a product -- water, citrus, baking soda, vinegar, mud, and bleach), but how many of us actually know that? Instead we go to the store and pick up Windex, Drain-o, and everything else, because we paid more attention to advertisements and marketing droids than the world around us.

The damage that modern technology has done to human resourcefulness makes me weep

Ok you peaked my interest. How do I clean with mud? Are you simply using a "Sandy mud" as an abrasive?

Sorry to be that guy, but I thought you might want to know: it's "piqued" my interest.

You could wash your hair with clay : http://www.mommypotamus.com/how-to-wash-your-hair-with-clay/

Yeah, it's an excellent abrasive for cleaning stainless steel. Sometimes works as a pumice-type scrub too. (Make sure your dirt is clean :)

I really want to believe you. Can you give some examples of cleaning products' replacements, or link to some more information?

Vinegar: against: fungi (mould), calcium deposits; shaving brush, bathroom, washing machine / dishwasher once every dozen washes.

Baking soda: against: bacteria. Mouthwash (halitosis), dishwasher (rank smells), shoes (quarter teaspoon, against smelly feet), ... basically everything.

Bleach: poisonous so be careful (no toothbrushes :)). Mortal killing death to everything. Essentially, if something is so far gone you recoil, bleach will overcome. Great if you're Dexter.

Lemon: fish and other foody oils. Bad smell in your skin / hair. CSI episode had a girl showering with lemon juice because she smelled like corpse. I believe them.

These are the rules of thumb of house cleaning.

Nonsensical aside: Acid + baking soda = fizzy, I don't know if they cancel each other out :p

Bleach: can clear clogged / slow drains (it'll dissolve hair after ~15min)

Regarding your nonsensical aside: try the recipe for Swedish Lemon Angels.

http://nowiknow.com/swedish-lemon-angels/

On lemons: if you have a dirty microwave, put half a lemon in a glass of water and microwave for a few minutes. Then wipe down the inside of the microwave with no effort.

After that, cut the lemon up and put the lemon down the disposal. Run it for a few seconds. Bam, no more bad smells from the disposal. Two for one!

I was confused by the second paragraph until I remembered that Americans put shredders into their kitchen sinks for whatever reason.

acid + baking soda clears a drain if you follow it with boiling water about 10min later

Not quite what you wanted but dishwasher concentrate is very good for almost everything. Cars, walls, skin, ...

Just don't overuse it.

* not machine dishwasher detergent, hand wash detergent

Valid point, but there are other things to consider. The reason I buy Windex is because it saves me time. Instead of buying vinegar, lemons, and rubbing alcohol and mixing them together with water every time I want to clean a something, I just grab the Windex/Lysol/etc. Likewise, I can spend time messing around with getting configs for various things in order, or I can one click deploy something to Heroku/AWS/DO/etc and not have to worry about it too much. It all depends on what's valuable to you.

I'd say that you can use the washing up liquid 'Fairy' (Dawn?) for almost all cleaning related tasks.

An exception is getting rid of limescale, where you need an acid. Citric acid works fine and does not smell.

If you have a wooden floor, a specially made detergent with a wax component is probably also a good idea.

I also have a machine with a private git repo that I keep some shit in - mostly half made things like an dead ant stack simulator, a non-working robot simulator controlled by a un-evolved neural network, a few heuristic Sudoku solvers, a really advanced configuration-management tool that might have worked at one point, and 20 years of random junk like that.

It actually also contains a GPU based Smith-Waterman algorithm using Aparapi that I think actually works and could possibly be moved to github without too much embarrassment. Maybe I should do that...

We could also all go back to wearing grass skirts and writing each other messages on tree bark with rocks and spending 18 hours a day foraging for food, 7 days a week 365 days a year. Technology and modern conveniences free us to a better life.

That's not quite the point though. All that foraging that you describe comes with the advantage of being self-reliant and completely in charge of your life.

While in that life you have to be in charge, you also get to be in charge.

The point is not to throw all of technology out the window, but to recognize that some technologies have made certain areas of our lives so easy, that we maybe overindulge in them, and stopped learning how to be self-reliant any more. I like to call it "over-civilization".

It's been an issue since someone first stuck a stick in a hole to get out a grub, but just because it's old, it doesn't mean it's not valid anymore.

The point of Github is not so much the repo hosting part (well, that too). The point of Github is

- the nice web UI for browsing code

- the social features (issues, pull requests, reviews)

That's why, after years of Gitolite (i.e. nearly as bare Git hosting as the submission discusses), I've switched to Gogs last year.

Yeah I love Gogs!!

How do you feel GitLab stacks up?

I don't know. I stopped reading at "Rails app".

Probably worth highlighting the gogs/gitea split: https://github.com/gogits/gogs/issues/1304#issuecomment-1191...

I would guess given that, gitea would be the better road at the moment.

I'm not sure, it looks both are still active.

That's fair enough. There's isn't really a good current state comparison of the two.

It was discussed in January, on HN, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13296717

Thanks for bringing that to my attention, I hadn't seen that. Worth reading is the last post in that thread, where Unknwon finally responds.

Agreed, I like having both of your points (plus user management).

Gogs is fast. Makes Gitlab seem very slow.

I wish I could agree here. I'd love to use Gogs. But it has had a crippling performance issue for big repositories for a while now, and the devs don't seem to prioritize it:

https://github.com/gogits/gogs/issues/3022

Interesting. Hadn't seen a "don't send pull requests" label before...so I guess they feel that issue has some wide-ranging implications? Which is odd because I can't think why it would...

I built a free lightweight service that automates this, and provides a nice CLI tool for interacting with it. Right now it deploys to free hosting on the gitup servers. Repo auth is handled via git-ssh verification with offloaded key storage and individual user roles/permissions.

https://gitup.io

https://npmjs.com/package/gitup-cli

Some commands include:

- `gitup login <username>` : authenticates/registers user

- `gitup new <repo-name>` : creates a new repo at gitup.io/username/repo-name

- `gitup add-user <repo-name> <username>` : share a repo with another gitup user

Repos are private by default. Right now this is a very basic free service but hope to expand the offering quickly including self hosting the repo storage, the key store, web interface, etc.

Would love to know if you check it out and come across a bug or have any feedback for me! Thank you.

Minor Feedback: I think part of the point of private hosting is privacy / security. Maybe some info on the landing page or documentation about what kind of security is provided would help people decide whether to use it. Also your npm package could use an actual module rather than just cli tool

Appreciate it! So far I've been only able to put minimal time into this, definitely trying to ramp up. I agree I need way, way more information about what the service is, why it's any good, etc.

Roger on the module, plans there as well - hope you'll check it out again soon.

Thanks again for your advice, much appreciated.

I don't really understand the service - is it standard Git hosting? (Just like GitHub / GitLab?) In that case, I think you're kind of missing the point of the linked post, which was about running Git locally as opposed to in someones cloud.

I hear you. I think where the similarity lies is for users looking for easy access to a private repo, which costs money on Github (but not locally or on Gitup). Bitbucket offers private repos as well, however Gitup is more optimized towards quick initialization and the terminal power-user. The end goal is for Gitup to be the easiest way to provision and manage self-hosted git at scale...we just aren't at the self-hosted part quite yet.

This is a P/T side-gig currently but hoping to find more time to put into it. Once the initial git-ssh implementation was in place, it was stable enough for me to start using for its original purpose and go back to working on other things. Too much to do!

Thanks for your note.

Wait, so people use git and they don't know this?

How?

Made me wonder too.

Add in a post-commit hook on a server-side repo and you have a decent code deployment system.

People drive without understanding engines. People cook without understanding the maillard reaction.

This isn't like driving without understanding engines. This is about paying a chauffeur to drive you everywhere without realizing that you could always just drive yourself there.

EDIT: Or better, having your buddy drive you in your car everywhere without realizing you could drive yourself.

No, this is like saying people cook with only a fry pan.[0]

[0] No disrespect to those who only have a fry pan to cook with.

> Wait, so people use git and they don't know this?

Oh God yes.

> How?

The same reason nobody seems to bother to read the RFC describing the standard they end up implementing badly, I presume.

I recently did something like this as well, and one thing I particularly missed was the convenience of quickly creating the remote repository, so I made this bash script: https://gist.github.com/zikes/926fd8bb72f9856776e309fba45f07...

An interesting thing about git, if there's an executable somewhere in your $PATH and it starts with git-, then it becomes a "git command". So in my case, I named it git-make-remote.sh, and I can execute it via "git make-remote myreponame" and it will SSH to my private git server and create the associated remote repo.

I have essentially the same tutorial on my readme here: https://github.com/divbit/grimoire except I've included a step where Ubuntu uncomplicated firewall is setup. I wonder if anyone has any suggestions on other basic security measures that should be taken for a private git repo?

I should add Linode to that.. didn't realize they have a $5 instance, having never used them.

I've git all my local scripts and snippets for years. Good to rollback sometimes. I have a 2010 laptop running behind TV. Any SSH host can be git server. And it hosts my owncloud. In purpose of rolling back binary documents, it works much faster and frequently.

I built a docker container that can serve as a quick plug and play ssh over git repository: https://github.com/rkcf/docker-git-server

Even if you need issues, you can still use apps like gitissius that will store the data in your repo https://github.com/glogiotatidis/gitissius/blob/master/READM...

For PRs there's https://github.com/google/git-appraise/blob/master/README.md

Those who are missing issue tracking with this approach might want to consider using Fossil (https://www.fossil-scm.org/) which includes a wiki and issue tracking in one simple DSCM system.

Until you start hankering for "rebase" or any other history-altering commands. However, if you don't generally use them, Fossil should be able to suit your VCS needs well enough.

For a lot of my non-critical work that I want to share between computers (e.g. desktop and laptop), I commit to various git repositories in my Dropbox. It's very convenient, and allows me to share my git repos as seamlessly as documents.

Careful with that. I used to do something similar, then one day all my git repos were suddenly corrupted due to duplicate and renamed files in the .git directory. I pinged Dropbox support to notify them of a bug in their OSX client, and their response was "Don't store git repos in Dropbox." YMMV

I had that happen with AeroFS instead of Dropbox, simply by using a repo on one machine that was not synced to the contents of the other machine. This can happen either if a machine doesn't finish sync to dropbox after using a repo in it, or the repo is used before the machine has finished syncing from dropbox. A simple "git commit" and close the laptop in a hurry as soon as the command finishes would likely do it.

Thanks for the warning -- I did not know that!

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