Can't you just run gitlab or whatever else out of a container in 5 seconds nowadays? Map a single volume and you are likely done. Its not that it's hard to self host that I choose to use third party git services (its clearly not!), it's just that the benefits of self hosting a git repository are increasingly few unless you have strict security requirements etc etc, and the free options are so good now. Running self hosted git is trivial in 2022 if you really need to, with many one-line container deployment options to choose from.

> https://registry.hub.docker.com/r/gitlab/gitlab-ce/

While it might be fun to self-host, a 5 dollar a month fee to run it is also not price competitive with the free or paid individual tiers at github.com for a single user too. I'd probably only do this if the git repo was being hosted on my home LAN.

> https://github.com/pricing

Yeah I'm sure you could. I use that VPS for my blog and personal projects also so I wanted to keep resource utilization to a minimum and not administer a webapp.

But why? If you have an SSH server running, you can immediately setup a git server. Just do git init —-bare, no gigantic web server overhead.

https://rgz.ee/git.html

Gitlab has a nice GUI, team features, and CI/CD integration. It's a reasonable choice for a team.

I also remember the there were tools that use Git as a backend for a change review system, and for an issue-tracking system (much like the stuff which Fossil has integrated).

With that, you theoretically don't need a central server at all, as long as you can send patches to each other. In practice, a central server is an important convenience that helps keep the history synchronized between several developers.

Presumably people value the UI (also, what is the "gigantic web server overhead" you're referring to?).

Ever tried to install gitlab? It's like 1GiB compressed package. lol

Gitea is much more lightweight.

Yeah you could even use recent ssh clients if you leave gitea, which is written in go, out of the equation:

https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/17798

It is easy to give people read-only git access no SSH, if you want to share your code with the internet at large?

If you add a git-daemon-export-ok file to the repo, it's accessible read-only over the git protocol. That's how all my repos on https://git.jeskin.net are setup.

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-The-Protoco...

note: Transposing "it" and "is" has made my question look sort of passive-aggressive or sarcastic, this was accidental.

The intent was clear from the context, no worries!

no, it's too bloaty to run it longer than the mentioned 5 seconds in good faith to not deplete the biosphere with bloat like that.

Stagit looks really nice and lightweight.

I like the idea of generating static webpages, it sounds great for read only content.

However, it doesn't sound very good for collaboration. Someone can come your repo but it doesn't seem easy for them to submit changes back upstream to your repo?

The best way to collaborate would be just sending patches, either with git send-email or as an attachment to a regular message. Then the author applies them and the repo/stagit will display the change.

https://git-send-email.io/