Host Your Own Private Git Repos

It's worth pointing out that you can host a public, read-only Git repository over HTTP without running any special software or permitting anonymous SSH. All you do is clone a bare Git repository into a directory that is publicly readable via your preferred HTTP daemon and run `git --bare update-server-info`. Et voila. It doesn't provide a fancy web GUI[1], but it does allow people to clone, and at the end of the day that's all you need for publishing your work to serious contributors.

For me this was the killer feature for transitioning to Git from SVN for my personal projects early on in the distributed SCM wars. I've been hosting my own services for over 15 years, and not having to manage niche daemons is extremely important to me from a time and security perspective. The only additional code I need to keep in mind is a simple post-receive hook that synchronizes a master Git repository to the public HTTP mirror on the same host, because I don't want my master repositories accessible within the HTTP daemon's chroot'd environment. I just hardlink that hook into any new repository I create.

Theoretically one could write a pure browser Git viewer and then the puzzle would be complete. The Git HTTP protocol doesn't utilize "index.html", so you can drop the JavaScript viewer into the same directory as the bare Git repository. Currently I put a simple HTML page at index.html telling people know that the directory is for cloning via a Git client (sometimes along with a link to the non-canonical Github mirror so people can view the code online).