README

Gitorious HTTP server
=====================

This package uses JGit's [1] implementation of "smart" HTTP transport for
Gitorious repositories. This will be *a lot* faster than the HTTP
transport that ships with Gitorious, since it uses Git's pack files
instead of walking individual commits. 

http://progit.org/2010/03/04/smart-http.html details the git part of this.

This app itself does very little, except translate the incoming URL to
a path in the file system. JGit is a truly awesome project, and does
most of the heavy lifting for us.

It supports pull only, ATM.


Running it:
-----------
- Copy src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml.example to src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml
- Verify URL mappings in GitoriousResolver (in src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml):

    <init-param>
      <param-name>repository_root</param-name>
      <!-- Enter the root of your repositories below -->
      <param-value>/opt/gitorious/repositories/</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <init-param>
      <param-name>permission_base_uri</param-name>
      <!-- Enter the URL your gitorious installation is set up with -->
      <param-value>http://gitorious.here:3000/</param-value>
    </init-param>

- mvn install
- mvn jetty:run

Try it out locally:

  git clone http://localhost:8080/<project>/<repository>.git

With jetty, standalone:
-----------------------

Download jetty, or install via your package manager. Configure WEB-INF/web.xml as above.
JETTY_HOME should be the root of your Jetty installation

$ mvn package
$ cp target/http-server-0.9-SNAPSHOT.war $JETTY_HOME/webapps/git.war
$ cd $JETTY_HOME
$ sudo -u git nohup java -jar start.jar >> gitorious_http.log &

This will start jetty and mount this app under /git.

Try it out:

  git clone http://localhost:<JETTY_PORT>/git/<project>/<repository>.git


Behind a proxy/cache: 
---------------------

When running in a production environment, you may set up the jetty
server to listen on port 80. If this is not an option, you may put
this behind a proxy. Gitorious will, by default, interpret all
requests to git.<gitorious_host> to be a Git-over-HTTP request. Taking
advantage of this, you could set up varnish as such (in
/etc/varnish/default.vcl), if you use Varnish [2]:

backend default {
  .host = "127.0.0.1";
  .port = "81"; # Provided Apache is set up to listen on 81
}

backend git_http {
  .host = "127.0.0.1";
  .port = "9000"; # The port Jetty is set up to listen on
}

sub vcl_recv {
  if (req.http.host ~ "^git.gitorious.org$") { # for gitorious.org
    if (req.url ~ ".git") {
      set req.backend = git_http;
      set req.url = "/git"  req.url;  # If jetty is not mounted on /
    } else {
      error 404 "This is not a Git repository";
    }
    # Defaults, uses the default backend
  } 
}


1: http://www.jgit.org/ Git, implemented in java
2: http://www.varnish-cache.org/ Varnish cache