not sure how lightweight any of these are, but https://gitolite.com/gitolite/ just needs git and ssh deployed. And it works like a charm.

running all my homelab / private repos off of a tiny gitolite3 server, and i'm always amazed that it all runs on an alpine linux VM that uses 75mb of RAM.

for anything even just sharing with friends or whatnot i won't recommend it though, people do love their web-UI and having to explicitly give someone access can turn off people already.

For a single author, if you have a server with SSH, you don't need Gitolite at all.

The lack of anonymous public access is often a deal-breaker though.

For a single author you don't necessarily need any server at all. A cloud directory or zip files work well.

But gitolite is so easy to setup & maintain, it's not a big difference and for r/w-access management within teams, it's priceless.

I guess one could even hack anonymous access with "PermitEmptyPasswords yes" and "AuthenticationMethods none"

No Gitolite requires keys.

Hence "hack". It needs keys for administration but at a first glance, I see no reason why a git-anon user couldn't be part of gitolite's git user.

You might need to use another user if you want to set its shell to `gitolite-shell username` (no command= for password authentication) but then you'd need to chain sudo or something to have Gitolite run under its own user again... Seems very tricky.

Or maybe you can write a shell that runs a gitolite-shell command is its arguments are not already gitolite-shell?

Ooh this is very nice. Might use this for private projects.

Problem with this is that it’s likely very unfamiliar with most folks. At least with gitea or gl-ce, there’s a familiar interface 99% of developers can use to browse and search code.

Like if I want to share a quick nixOS config, I doubt most people would even be willing to pull the code and only browse via web interface.