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Comment by phonethrowaway | Hacker News Reader

But git already has a built in webserver...

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-GitWeb

Yes! This has been there for over a decade! And since there have been hundreds of alternative UI tools that build upon this same tooling.

How are people here saying they've never heard of this? Oof... Typical developers, not even familiar with their tools.

TIL! Thanks! Interesting, though, that it doesn't appear to work with MacOS built-in apache (webrick works fine though).

Can you run it with python's built in http server? That's native on all OSX installs.

I believe OSX ships with Python2 by default, right?

https://docs.python.org/2/library/cgihttpserver.html

Hmm...

Yup MacOS ships with python. I didn’t try a python server since the ruby webrick server worked fine I just found it curious Apache didn’t work since it also ships in the OS.

The fact that this is news to people here is confirmation that it was a mistake.

Are all HN stories about mistakes?

I disagree, the fact that it's news to people here means people don't know their tools as well as one might assume.

Implying that it's a mistake because people don't know about it is very odd. Clearly, I know about it, as do others.

It's been possible for 10+ years to serve git repos using gitweb, and mercurial repos using hgweb. We did this in like 2007-2009ish, locally, in our LAN, among developers... because our code couldn't be pushed to a third party for... reasons.

Eventually I did setup our own internal SSH server to serve the repos, but for quick browsing of a team's repo state, using the built in HTTP server is just fine.

I definitely did not know that. Thanks!

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