Installing cgit on a Joyent Shared Accelerator (Solaris)

gistfile1.md

This was originally posted on 2009-04-16 to http://andrewho.co.uk/weblog/installing-cgit-on-a-joyent-shared-accelerator-solaris

I recently found the time to setup a web frontend to git on my Shared Accelerator. Pretty much all of my data (including work) is under version control so this is useful for those occasions when I'm away from my own computer but want to fetch a file. I went with cgit rather than gitweb because the configuration looked cleaner and more powerful; it also (utterly unscientifically) felt a lot more responsive (it is meant to be, especially once you enable the cache). The installation proved to be less trivial than I expected upon first inspection, hence this documentation.

Compiling cgit

The first step is to fetch the cgit source and get it ready for compilation. I did this in ~/tmp.

% git clone git://hjemli.net/pub/git/cgit
% cd cgit
% git submodule init
% git submodule update

Edit the configuration variables at the top of the Makefile. Pretty much the most important variable is CGIT_CONFIG; here's my configuration:

CGIT_VERSION = v0.8.2.1
CGIT_SCRIPT_NAME = cgit.cgi
CGIT_SCRIPT_PATH = /users/home/andrewlkho/cgi-bin
CGIT_DATA_PATH = $(CGIT_SCRIPT_PATH)
CGIT_CONFIG = /users/home/andrewlkho/etc/cgitrc
CACHE_ROOT = /users/home/andrewlkho/var/cache/cgit
SHA1_HEADER = <openssl/sha.h>
GIT_VER = 1.6.1.1
GIT_URL = http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-$(GIT_VER).tar.bz2
INSTALL = install

There are some syntax oddities that Solaris' /bin/sh doesn't like, so the easiest thing to do is change the interpreter to /usr/local/bin/bash. This only applies to gen-version.sh.

#!/usr/local/bin/bash
...

Solaris doesn't have timegm (a non-standard GNU extension) so we need to apply this patch from Apple. Place the following code somewhere near the top of ui-stats.c.

#include <time.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

time_t timegm (struct tm *tm) {
    time_t ret;
    char  *tz;

    tz = getenv("TZ");
    setenv("TZ", "", 1);
    tzset();
    ret = mktime(tm);
    if (tz)
        setenv("TZ", tz, 1);
    else
        unsetenv("TZ");
    tzset();
    return ret;
}

Finally, compile cgit and copy the relevant files into place.

% LDFLAGS="-lnsl" NO_STRCASESTR=yes NO_ICONV=yes CC=gcc \
> gmake
% mkdir ~/web/public/git
% cp cgit ~/cgi-bin/cgit.cgi
% cp {cgit.css,cgit.png} ~/web/public/git

cgit configuration

The next step is to configure cgit. The manpage documents all of the configuration variables, but to get you off the ground the following will suffice. I've only entered one (bare) repository, but you can repeat those lines as many times as you want for more repositories. Remember, this is in ~/etc/cgitrc

css=/git/cgit.css
logo=/git/cgit.png

repo.url=bin
repo.path=/users/home/andrewlkho/git/bin.git
repo.desc=A bunch of useful scripts for my ~/bin

We now have a fully working cgit setup; just navigate to your equivalent of http://andrewho.co.uk/cgi-bin/cgit.cgi and browse away.

Extra credit: git.andrewho.co.uk

Whilst that's all fine and dandy, I wanted a slightly more semantic path to the interface. This isn't as easy it sounds due to the fact that mod_vd and mod_rewrite simply don't play together in any nice well-documented way. To save you quite a bit of grief, I'll just present the final result.

This is what ~/etc/cgitrc now looks like:

virtual-root=/

css=/cgit.css
logo=/cgit.png

repo.url=bin
repo.path=/users/home/andrewlkho/git/bin.git
repo.desc=A bunch of useful scripts for my ~/bin

The following is in ~/web/public/.htaccess

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^git\.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteRule .* - [L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^git\.
RewriteRule ^git/$ /cgi-bin/cgit.cgi [L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^git\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /cgi-bin/cgit.cgi?url=$1 [L,QSA]

Now if you fire up your equivalent of http://git.andrewho.co.uk/ you should have a bunch of slightly nicer URLs to navigate through. Enjoy!