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Comment by mawalu | Hacker News Reader

I'm not really looking for a new git repository hosting service but this seems cool. I was a bit disappointed that I had to download a cli tool after signing up. It would be cool if you could do all the management non-git operations via ssh and without any additional client software

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You can actually! The cli is just a really dumb wrapper around ssh execs.

create: ssh git@gitern.com gitern-create <path>

delete: ssh git@gitern.com gitern-delete <path>

list: ssh git@gitern.com gitern-list [<path>]

pubkey add: ssh git@gitern.com gitern-pubkey-add <account> (pubkey on stdin)

pubkey remove: ssh git@gitern.com gitern-pubkey-remove <SHA256 fingerprint> <account>

pubkey list: ssh git@gitern.com gitern-pubkey-list

Edit: Eventually the cli will provide a lot more (and self document what's available) so I do recommend using it, but you can happily get along with these "raw" commands for now.

I love it. Would feel more comfortable with a bash source-file I could copy than an installer tbh.

This reminds me, as I suppose you expect, of a lovely ssh-based chat service i saw on here a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8743374

Thanks! I agree. I want to provide more client-side options eventually (e.g. a static binary or pick your language flavor cli), but had a bunch of tradeoffs to consider for first pass. I'll likely open source the client side and keep the ssh api backward compatible, so perhaps this can happen soon.

Re: ssh-based chat. I found that post very very early on while exploring gitern as just an idea! Very formative of gitern.

For a hacker's client to github, I'd recommend having a look at ingydotnet's git-hub which is bash + his json-bash thing.

Interesting prior art and maybe some stealable concepts :D

Wonderful!

Yes, I'm sorry to say I feel the same. I set up my public key with you, but not willing to run a strange new executable on my machine

https://gitern.com/#downloads now provides a posix shell script for those that prefer it

These should absolutely be documented on the site!

When I looked at the CLI source I almost walked away. 112MB spread across 12k files from a developer I don't know is _way_ too scary to trust with access to my SSH private keys. Being able to manage it without that CLI tool, though, makes it something I might try out.

Noted. I think the path I'll be taking is documentation and providing a bash script for those that would prefer it. Thank you for the feedback!

112 MB is way overkill for a command-line tool which can issue a few commands over ssh. This should be a shell script shorter than 5 KiB.

https://gitern.com/#downloads now provides a posix shell script ~2.8KB for those that prefer it

I've since documented the commands: https://gitern.com/#commands

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