rgitweb

A fully static, client-side Git repository browser — a cgit replacement with no server-side rendering at all.

Point it at the URL of a Git repository hosted as static files (the dumb-HTTP layout maintained by git update-server-info) to browse code, branches, tags, history, and commit details—entirely in the browser.

How it works

The app uses exactly the same data as a dumb-HTTP git clone would read, but only as necessary. It uses pack file .idx indexes to locate packed objects, and makes HTTP Range requests to fetch just that object's bytes from the .pack. Packs are immutable, so caching is handled natively by the browser.

Hosting requirements for browsed repositories

• A bare repository served as static files, with git update-server-info run after each update (see .git/hooks/post-update.sample for how to do this automatically).
• If rgitweb is not on the same origin as the repository, the repo must be served with suitable CORS headers allowing the browsing origin, exposing Accept-Ranges and Content-Range.
• For efficiency, the server should support Range requests; without it the app falls back to fetching the entire pack file into memory at once.

Development

npm install
npm run dev       # local dev server
npm test          # Jest; fixtures are built with the real git CLI
npm run lint:fix  # ESLint (includes formatting)
npm run build     # static site in dist/

See ARCHITECTURE.md for architecture notes and conventions.

Configuration

There are a few UI options that can be dynamically configured with a JSON file loaded at runtime. To enable this feature, set VITE_CONFIG_PATH at build time to a (possibly relative) URL path to this JSON file. If this variable is unset during the build, the app does not fetch a config. See src/ui/config.ts for documentation on configuration options.

History

This repository was forked from https://github.com/andrewaylett/rgitweb, which appears to have been largely or entirely AI-generated in a single commit. That code mostly worked, though the UI was a bit weird and there were some half-baked features that have been removed.

The UI has subsequently been significantly reworked; the original src/git has largely been left alone since for the most part it seems to work fine as-is.

Example deployment

This fork can be seen in action at https://src.wolfgangfaust.com/browse/#/r/%2Frgitweb.git

The upstream project has a demo available at https://andrewaylett.github.io/rgitweb/#/r/https%3A%2F%2Fandrewaylett.github.io%2Frgitweb%2Fgit/summary