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Comment by mejutoco | Hacker News Reader

> 4. Do you just want to host repositories?

an ssh connection and

    git --bare init

on your ssh accessible server works just fine

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“Just” is a four letter word and a trap our industry repeatedly falls into.

https://sgringwe.com/2019/10/10/Please-just-stop-saying-just

If all you want to do is host repositories, “just” is the appropriate word here. For lone wolf work, all I care about is having a remote that mirrors all the changes and branches I create locally. It’s just redundancy. A git bare repo and SSH are all that’s needed.

I don’t do pull requests to myself, and I don’t need a bug tracker or CI.

But sometimes it's applied properly! https://github.com/casey/just

Is that a just cause?

I hadn't read this article until now, but I started catching myself using the word at work a few years ago and I've actively been trying to avoid using it for the reasons laid out in this post.

I didn't check if this was mentioned in the article but I've heard it described as a "lullaby word". I think that is very apt, and I have stopped using it whenever I can.

edit: totally wrong

I think they mean the "just" in "Do you just want to host repositories?", implying that it's never "just" hosting repositories, and the needs will continue to grow beyond what the simple solution offers.

I must be illiterate. Ofc. Sorry

> the needs will continue to grow beyond what the simple solution offers.

If they do, then migrate to a provider that offers what you need at that time. It's not like adding a new remote is hard.

i used to feel the same way, but with coding agents, the Justers are surely having the last laugh

It can be as brief as:

ssh server git --bare init myrepo.git

git clone server:myrepo.git

You can even support Actions with this method if you're not afraid of a little scripting. https://git-scm.com/book/ms/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks

Beautiful !

> git clone server:myrepo.git

or if your local repo existed first:

  git remote add server server:myrepo.git
  git push -u server @

That's what gitolite does with some helper scripts for creating/setting up the repositories, adding metadata to the configs, etc. That way your `git` user can be set to reject ssh login attempts. The projects are managed by pushing a config to a gitolite admin repository.

Cool thing about gitolite is that you manage it using text files and committing to the gitolite admin git repository.

We were using it until we grew tired of not having a web view to comment and review patches so we switched to gitea.

It is much more complex than this to get basic GitHub functionality anyone who has tried can tell you that. It feels like it should be a simple command but it absolutely isn’t

> 4. Do you just want to host repositories?

Yes it is not so straight forward to be able to push/pull from a repository over ssh especially with multiple users etc there are a bunch of additional configs required for this

once you add multiple users, bare git stops feeling "just" pretty fast. do you need reviews/CI too, or only shared access?

Quick intro for this method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuIdBfjL62s

At least in small scale, having your own git server is trivially easy. Why are organizations so eager to put a third-party layer on top of that?

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