Git without a hosted platform

People have apparently started believing that in order to use git, you’d have to also have to host the project on Github or Gitlab:

• A few weeks ago, a friend told me that he keeps his pass password repository on Github.
• Beej wrote a guide on git and the Github workflow is very prominent in it
• I came home from FOSDEM with a Github and a Gitlab sticker, but not with one for git send-email or cgit.

I feel that is is underreported that you can easily host Git repos on a normal Unix account. I use this all the time myself for my personal projects – I maintain far more repositories locally over SSH than I expose on hosted platforms. This is not visible on the public internet, but maybe that makes it especially mention-worthy.

How it’s done

All you need is an account on a Unix/Linux machine, which you can reach over SSH.

1. On the remote side, set up the repo:

   mkdir -p ~/repos/foobar.git
   cd ~/repos/foobar.git
   git init --bare
   

2. On the local side, set up the remote:

   git remote add foobar user@hostname:repos/foobar.git
   git push --set-upstream foobar main
   

There is not much more to it. Now you can push and pull.

A more detailed description that also covers SSH keys can be found in the Git Book.

What if I need more?

The approach scales and extends to bigger endeavors as well.

• Web UI: You can set up cgit on a web server to render your repositories.
• Code review: Some projects do code reviews over git send-email. The Linux kernel is known for this and scales up to thousands of developers.

If a project grows and you want to work with people who can’t wrap their heads around this, you can still fall back to a hosted platform after the fact and push your repository there later.

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