Git in minutes

3-minute read
_N0x

A Git-Server Setup In Minutes

Sometimes I wish I had other hobbies then just trying out new stuff I discovered online.

For Some strange reason I felt the need to set up my own git server - because who doesn’t need an own server for the two or three projects you keep on github? I looked around and searched for some solutions that would fit my needs.

My requirements were:

  • Easy setup
  • Very Low System requirements for the host
  • Account management
  • Private and Public Repos
  • Open Source

The Possibilities

There were multiple solutions to choose from.

The first one was GitLab Core. GitLab is widely know and a nice alternative to GitHub. But GitLab core does require some more System resources then my current Server has and so I ruled it out. It is good for bigger companies but I just needed something small.

Gitea was the next thing I came across. It checks all the boxes: lightweight, simple install, Open Source, etc. I downloaded it but had trouble getting it to run with my current database without exposing my database port to the internet and that is a big No. I don’t want to open any more ports in my firewall then I need to.

Here is where GitBucket (not to be confused with ATLASSIANs Bitbucket) came into play. It has similar features as Gitea but I was able to set it up exactly how I wanted to.

So now git.n0x.io is a thing!

Setting up GitBucket

Prerequirements

Just FYI I am running a little Debian 9 vServer so you might need to adapt the commands and changes to your system - which should be self-explanatory ;)

GitBucket is mostly written in Scala so we firstly need to install openJDK on our Server to run it.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install openjdk-11-jre

After installing the JRE I created a user account on which GitBucket should run. This way we make sure that I we do not grant to much privileges to GitBucket - it only gets the minimal things it needs to run

sudo adduser --system gitbucket

The --system parameter creates a systemuser account which mean a user that has no shell so we can’t log into it the normal su way. To login to the new user use the following command:

sudo su - gitbucket -s /bin/bash

With -s /bin/bash we provide a shell to the user so we don’t get logged out immediately.

Now we download the latest version of BitBucket (in my case 4.32.0) from GitHub to our local home.

cd ~
wget https://github.com/gitbucket/gitbucket/releases/download/4.32.0/gitbucket.war

Running GitBucket

That is pretty much it. Now we can run GitBucket.war for the first time. There are multiple parameters you can specify (See the official installation guide) but for now we stick with just specifying the port we want GitBucket to run on initially

java -jar gitbucket.war --port=8080

If you have a firewall set up like I do, you of course need to open up the port you specified. For example if you use iptables:

sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 8080 -j ACCEPT