DATE: Wed 12 May 2021 By: HexDSL@Posteo.net
As you may know from recently posts I'm on something of a self-hosting binge. With my website, gemini and pleroma being self hosted, I figured why not also just do git too! I also have plan to have my own note taking system, paste bin and file sharing services. But I take this one service at a time!
Yes. I do. Well, no not really, but sort of. I think that git is *massive* overkill for the simple public sharing of files. I don't care about versioning, the collaboration or the command line interface. Not that I think any of it is bad. I like all of it but for the primary objective of sharing my dot files it's insane overkill.
I was going to just expose a folder to the cold of the internet but some email made me realise that its not about what I want. Its about the tooling on the other end. I didn't realise that people were git cloning my dots so see what I had been up to and to pinch the odd config. If I removed git functionality I would be causing inconvenience for apparently quite a lot of people (surprised me how many got in touch to be honest)
With git people seem to default to github or gitlab with the occasional enlightened soul using codeberg (and that doesn't even have 'git' in the name!) whatever you choose its hosted by someone else and if they change things, you have to live with it. With this in mind I decided that if I'm stuck with the overkill of git then it has to be *my* git.
Go and web search for the string "self hosted git" and see where you end up. Gitea is a great choice and a pretty familiar interface. It supports all the things I want out of my git-ing. Its not too heavy on the hardware. It has all the features I want on the web interface and supports private repos. Also, I like tea.
I followed the install form binary guide on the website. The guide is fine, a few things could be clearer and somehow it set my user to "root" without me realising. After some problem hunting I figured that out (thanks good pal ozoned for noticing that one) It fired up and was pretty useable out of the box.
I still have to make it look more "mine" but overall I'm pretty happy with the stock experience.
The instance WAS located at https://dots.hexdsl.co.uk, and yes. The moment I finished setting it up realised it should have been git.hexdsl.co.uk. I was distracted by the install process and didn't think things through. My logic was that my URL for my gitlab was already dots.hexdsl.co.uk and I wanted peoples links to work. I should have gone with 'git' and then cosmetically linked 'dots' to my specific dots page in that repo. Good fucking job me.... I was irritated by the error and was going to do it all again. Then I realised no one other than me will care. No one reads URLS and everyone clicks links. I WILL however cosmetically link 'git' at some point I thought. It is super annoying that a single moment of thought would have rectified this error in my head.
I made a video about all of this then ex than and got annoyed while talking about the oversight. I had a good old talk with myself and an hour after telling myself all the reasons it doesn't matter, I went ahead and corrected it. All it took was changing some app.ini settings, the DNS with my provider and re-running cert-bot. Took me longer than I wanted to spend on something that I'm pretty only I care about but yeah, its done now.
No. I don't want to be responsible for anyone else's data. If any of my friends want accounts for things I'll let them but discourage it. Open registration is turned off! get your own git! :D
As regular viewers/readers/listeners will know I am currently making a valiant effort to "GetGud" at C programming and I have no doubt that there will come a time when I will want to use git to host a project or tool. When that happens I'll be very happy that I took the time to set this up.
For now though, I'll just bask in how great my git server is... any try to make the theme pinker!