Soft Serve: A self-hosted Git server for the command line | Hacker News Reader

Soft Serve: A self-hosted Git server for the command line

github.com

18 pointsgoranmoomin9 comments

Git doesn't need a server. As long as you have git installed and an SSH account, that's all you need.

Well i do agree that the title they choose for this project is kinda stupid. But with some argumentative charity we can do better: this is a TUI for managing git repos, kinda like a TUI for gitolite+cgit. And it's a server-side program so you can work some magic with ssh forced-command. I think it's cute, altho i'm perfectly fine with doing stuff manually.

I do think it's something that needs that be talked about more. No doubt there are people who think that this whole overgrowth of cruft around git is git.

Git is a distributed version control system. It doesn't need servers. That's in fact one of its bigger selling points. If a meteor hits github or gitlab or whatever, it's enough that you have a cloned version of your repo to completely recover. You can set up your own remote on a raspberry pi at home.

No matter how distributed your tool is (like git), it's usually nice to have stable servers being part of the network (i suppose your laptop is not serving git repos for others to clone from). Torrents are distributed and yet i'm using a personal server as seedbox. I'm not here trying to defend this particular product, but in general it is nice to have git repo servers. Git is already good enough for a repo to be at several places, so this isn't threatening at al, it is actually the best of both worlds (distributed hence independence for users and "super nodes" for network efficiency and stability). What is threatening tho is addons which are built centralized like mainstream issue trackers and for that i completely agree with you.

> You can set up your own remote on a raspberry pi at home.

Yes indeed, and as far as i understand OP's program is something to manage your raspberry git remote.

Hi, Toby from Charm here. With Soft Serve the account system isn’t tied to the machine. You can configure access by cloning the config repo, then editing a yaml. This makes it easy to add collaborators vs adding user accounts to the underlying server. It also allows for anonymous access. You can test our server:

ssh git.charm.sh

We also made it so it creates repos on first push. The navigation TUI is served directly over SSH.

This is a great looking tool that seems to scratch an itch that is hard to reach.

Brilliant marketing too.

Kudos.

Thank you so much!

Brilliant marketing for an open source command line tool. Take a look at their Charm initiative:

https://www.charm.sh/

Other than the TUI, it looks like Soft Serve does some of what Gitolite does?

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