Show HN: Gitern is a Git host for hackers

by k00b • 6 years ago

112 84 6 years ago

k00b32• 6 years ago

Hello! I'm Keyan and I'm building https://gitern.com

Perhaps I'm an odd duck (I am) but I think current git hosts are no longer meant for hackers and I really wanted a git host that is and that's why I'm building gitern.

Gitern is just getting started and only has essential features today but we already have a few differentiators: - all auth is done with ssh keys (no password or email required) - arbitrary repository paths allowing for (1) familiar namespacing and (2) access control (eventually) - a cli-first ui - private repos are default

I think better tools make for better hackers and I think git hosts can be a lot better.

I'll be in the comments if anyone wants to ask questions or scold me or something :). Very very open to feedback!

Cheers everyone

SahAssar• 6 years ago

Why would I use this instead of a pure ssh storage service like rsync.net? Because of per-repo keys?

k00b32• 6 years ago

Mostly because you have or anticipate having git-specific needs other than backups, like having a central collaboration point as part of your git workflows. You can use gitern like a backup service, but that is a subset of what is intended.

(I don't use that rsync service so I'm just guessing as to how you use it. If you can provide more context, I might be able to help further.)

At the moment, the feature set around git workflows is not more than just providing authorized access for several users to a git repo itself but I'll be providing more features around this soon in a way that improves on what currently exists on git hosts.

jhardy544• 6 years ago

Does rsync.net give me the ability to stop people from force-pushing to `master`? My understanding was that it was aware of files but had no concept of Git.

jhardy544• 6 years ago

Hey Keyan!

Sort of off-topic, but I just tried your chore chart -- what does '2X' mean? How can something get assigned to me twice?

Cheers.

k00b32• 6 years ago

lol thanks for checking choremate out!

Assuming you're using the chore chart with others, you are now assigned the chore twice rather than once in the rotation of the chore. It's no more than a weak disincentive for missing chores. (A better disincentive would be fines as I write about here https://keyankousha.com/the-best-chore-chart-in-the-world.ht... ... which I haven't implemented because I didn't need them in my housing situation as the weak disincentive of more chores worked fine.)

deeblering4• 6 years ago

Hey, I know gitern is cli based, but I wanted to compliment you on the design of the gitern.com site. Love the colors, artwork, everything. Very minimalistic and tasteful.

k00b32• 6 years ago

Thank you! That makes me feel so good, thank you

lullibrulli2• 6 years ago

I thought you were trolling with the colors, but there is actually content below the fold, which I completely missed.

wwright3• 6 years ago

If you're going all-in on the hacker aesthetic, have you considered supporting Pijul? http://pijul.org/

In theory it has many advantages over Git, with the downsides being adoption and rough edges... but those shouldn't be a problem for hackers ;)

k00b32• 6 years ago

Very cool. I've added it to my reading list

bobuk2• 6 years ago

Do you follow to pijul development? Looks like it stall or paused, no new patches since 2019 :(

JamesLeonis• 6 years ago

My favorite feature is the SSH-as-account instead of the usual email/password combo! I'm definitely going to check this out. Down with passwords!

rapnie• 6 years ago

Looks very nice, minimalistic. Just wanted to make you aware of ForgeFed [0]. Don't know how it fits in your approach and that depends on features you planned, but maybe just like Vervis [1] you could be one of the early adopters and become the forge of choice on the fediverse (they love this stuff, just like they also embrace Sourcehut).

[0] https://forgefed.peers.community

[1] https://dev.angeley.es/s/fr33domlover/p/vervis

nurettin3• 6 years ago

This is soooo comfortable, thank you!

k00b32• 6 years ago

Awesome! That's EXACTLY what I'm going for. I kept using github and having this feeling of "this doesn't feel like it was built for me."

Current git hosts don't feel like they were made for programmers which is nuts! Even for the most essential and basic actions (all of what gitern provides at the moment), they feel kludgy. My intent is to carry a programmer-first approach for all needs programmers have around git hosts. I have SO many ideas on how to do this.

If you couldn't tell, I'm very happy to hear you had a positive impression lol. Thank you!

nurettin3• 6 years ago

Yes, it is encouraging to see that people are still interested in creating brutalist interfaces.

I'm not sure how it would fit a professional workflow, since that would require your server to call a web hook whenever somebody merges to a given branch, but it would do fine in an amateur workflow where I set up my own CI/CD using local hooks.

ydnaclementine• 6 years ago

Very cool, I've had this same idea sitting in the back of my head too, instead of user names there are just ssh keys

Honestly we've seen a ton of cool side projects like this on HN because of quarantine

mawalu• 6 years ago

I'm not really looking for a new git repository hosting service but this seems cool. I was a bit disappointed that I had to download a cli tool after signing up. It would be cool if you could do all the management non-git operations via ssh and without any additional client software

k00b32• 6 years ago

You can actually! The cli is just a really dumb wrapper around ssh execs.

create: ssh git@gitern.com gitern-create <path>

delete: ssh git@gitern.com gitern-delete <path>

list: ssh git@gitern.com gitern-list [<path>]

pubkey add: ssh git@gitern.com gitern-pubkey-add <account> (pubkey on stdin)

pubkey remove: ssh git@gitern.com gitern-pubkey-remove <SHA256 fingerprint> <account>

pubkey list: ssh git@gitern.com gitern-pubkey-list

Edit: Eventually the cli will provide a lot more (and self document what's available) so I do recommend using it, but you can happily get along with these "raw" commands for now.

hgo• 6 years ago

I love it. Would feel more comfortable with a bash source-file I could copy than an installer tbh.

This reminds me, as I suppose you expect, of a lovely ssh-based chat service i saw on here a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8743374

irgeek2• 6 years ago

These should absolutely be documented on the site!

When I looked at the CLI source I almost walked away. 112MB spread across 12k files from a developer I don't know is _way_ too scary to trust with access to my SSH private keys. Being able to manage it without that CLI tool, though, makes it something I might try out.

k00b32• 6 years ago

I've since documented the commands: https://gitern.com/#commands

agambrahma• 6 years ago

Any reason I'd use this instead of Sourcehut [1] ?

[1] https://sourcehut.org

k00b32• 6 years ago

I'm not familiar with sourcehut but thank you for sharing. I'd say if you're using a git host you're already happy with you should keep using it for sure.

mst2• 6 years ago

You seriously want to play with sourcehut.

It has its own very hacker-oriented aesthetic and tries to keep the various components it provides separated so for things that are "close enough" you might be able to bootstrap off their tools.

Also, the concept of a CI system where a failed build sticks around for a while and lets you ssh in to figure out what went wrong is -way- cool.

sjellis• 6 years ago

Competition is not a bad thing, but I'd definitely recommend that people check out Sourcehut.

Sourcehut ticks all of the boxes for a well-run project: Open Source, good engineering, sensible financial plan, excellent maintainer who works well with others, and constant, sustainable progress.

Sourcehut is also accumulating lot of support for niche things that other providers don't support at all: e.g. it is a Mercurial host as well as a Git host, and the CI supports BSD OSes.

mjsir911• 6 years ago

This is really nice!

I wonder if some of the cli commands like create can be auto-executed on first git push.

Is this open source? Would love to hack onto it.

k00b32• 6 years ago

I will likely open source the client side. So stay tuned :)

Edit: Meant to add I've had a similar idea but it should probably be optional and configurable in a git config type way.

chris_st• 6 years ago

What is the fallback if you lose your SSH keys?

k00b32• 6 years ago

At the moment, it's left to the user to add other ssh keys, perhaps from another machine, or back them up.

I'm currently working on a way to optionally add an email address for recovery.

techntoke2• 6 years ago

Is this for script kiddies that just want to be called a hacker? All the hackers I know realize Git is already decentralized and all you need is an SSH server.

k00b32• 6 years ago

Someone: opens a dumpling restaurant

You: Is this for food kiddies that want to be called foodies? All the foodies I know realize dumplings are just sheets of dough wrapped around a filling.

techntoke2• 6 years ago

These 2 don't relate at all. By your definition, the service might as well be a platform for disc jockeys because computers and speakers both use electricity.

account42• 6 years ago

Except wrapping dumplings is a pain in the ass while sshd comes pre-installed on most VPSs and you can just point a git remote at that.

fcatus• 6 years ago

I agree, the whole thing is cringe... looks and sounds hippie...

k00b32• 6 years ago

I'm a huge hippie actually so spot on. I think my person category would be "tech hippie" if there were such things.

robotmay• 6 years ago

As one of those odd people who actually knows someone who plays a Gittern; I love the name and the medieval theme to the site :D

k00b32• 6 years ago

lol I wasn't expecting anyone to get the reference! I listened to this approximately a million times during development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQbfcTIRFxA

oxed• 6 years ago

Meh, I host my git repos on a vps and use cgit for web ui.

cypres• 6 years ago

I was expecting a static binary when I downloaded the CLI, but I got a huge load of node.js files and modules. Consider packaging your node.js application up, I haven't tried it but https://github.com/nexe/nexe looks promising.

k00b32• 6 years ago

Thanks for the link. v0 cli was written in gerbil scheme (http://cons.io) but I couldn't get it to statically link on linux so I'd still have deps in the form of dynamic libs. Then I found oclif which while depending on node has a lot of what I need and will allow me to ship/iterate faster ... If the spec/features/api was fixed, I'd write the thing in golang if only for the static binaries and cross compiling but it's a relatively joyless/cumbersome language IME, so node for now at least.

szek2• 6 years ago

I was writing a similar cli tool [1] to manage the git repositories on my own server. If you want portability, it should be fairly easy to write the cli interface in plain sh or bash, especially when most of the operations could be done on the server side. I am not sure if there is a reason to use a compiled language for this.

[1] https://0x0.st/8zs0

vemv• 6 years ago

Funny, just a while ago was pondering on what a "github for hackers" would look like.

My personal answer would be: it should be a hackable webapp, where users can implement or tweak features at will.

The ingredients being the usual:

- a plugin system

- a function hooks system

- many, many available options that are never taken away (i.e. breaking API changes).

When was the last time you used a webapp even remotely like that?

k00b32• 6 years ago

Yep, we're thinking about this alike! My answer will be: an emacs-like git hosting experience.

tikej• 6 years ago

emacs-like git hosting experience

Sounds like git heaven for hackers ;)

camgunz• 6 years ago

I’m so into this. I love the aesthetic and the hacker values. Do you have a blog or anything?

Edit: scrolled to the bottom, nice Twitter :)

k00b32• 6 years ago

Thank you! I have a mostly empty blog http://keyankousha.com (I have some drafts in the pipeline but I don't have a good writing habit yet). Twitter is a little more active @k00bideh

eejdoowad• 6 years ago

Love the concept and design.

Where are repositories stored and do you use any sort of backup or replication?

k00b32• 6 years ago

Thanks. Repositories are stored on an ext4 filesystem. I do backups every 12 hours currently. No additional replication is performed but it is something I want to do.

stevekemp• 6 years ago

You'll probably want to look into using CEPH/similar when/if the service starts to get busy. Partly for redundancy but also if all your repositories are on a single shared disk you're gonna hit I/O contention if many people are pushing/pulling at the same time - even more so if you get any CI system wired up.

drKarl• 6 years ago

Hey, first of all, cool project! Although I certainly see the romantic appeal of "no email or password, just ssh key" and "the cli is the ui", other than for solo hackers I think you need a way to visualize the changes of a Pull Request (or Merge Request like in Gitlab) and do a code review, add comments, etc. Or at least Patch Review like in sr.ht I actually think that would be useful even for a solo hacker. Other features would also be welcomed, like CI/CD and tickets to track new features and bugs, but you can always integrate with a third party service for that. Also, unless I'm missing a key feature, I think for the use case you're appealing to you could just have a repo in a VPS or rsync.net. And the comparison with Dropbox doesn't apply here because dropbox is for the masses, and gitern ia for hackers, any hacker would know how to set that up. Finally with keybase you can create encrypted git repos. You can, manually set encrypted git repos on a VPS but it's difficult, keybase does it hassle free. You can also self-host something like gitea/gogs or gitbucket, or even gitlab.

k00b32• 6 years ago

This very thorough and great feedback. Thank you!

Show HN: Gitern is a Git host for hackers

Related Stories