Package: gitzebo
What is gitzebo?gitzebo is a small Python git management web application.  It was named
gitzebo as it is intended to be a smaller, more lightweight, more secluded
variant of the service GitHub and GitLab provide.It is ideal for creating, managing, and sharing git repositories among
small groups of developers.Quality Warninggitzebo is under development.  This means that a bare minimum of functionality
is available, and it likely contains bugs.The following features are planned, but missing:paginationgitzebo-generate-confutility to generate configuration templatesWhere Does gitzebo Run?gitzebo theoretically runs on any host with git and Python installed.Realistically, it has only been tested on CentOS 6.5.  This means that
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 will likely work with no modifications, and
that some slight variances in deployment instructions will be needed for
Debian-based hosts (including Ubuntu).I’m working on setting up automated testing across multiple platforms.Where’s More?The Python Package Index (PyPI) hosts source distributions.  The gitzebo
page ishere.  This means thatpip,easy_install, and the like can be used to install gitzebo.Documentation will eventually appearon my site.How? (Deployment)Prior to installing, you’ll need to havegit,python, andvirtualenvinstalled.  On RHEL/CentOS, you can install them with:# as root user
# python-virtualenv lives in EPEL, install EPEL:
rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
yum -y install git python python-virtualenvWe also assume the presence of a git user (to run the webapp and to own
the repositories managed by it), and that an/opt/gitdirectory exists
owned by this user.  Make it so:# as root user
getent passwd git || useradd git
if [[ ! -d "/opt/git" ]]
then
    mkdir -p /opt/git
    chown git: /opt/git
fiBefore deploying the web app, you need to install gitzebo and initialize
its sqlite database.  Note that your virtualenv should be readable by root if
you want Apache deployment to work.  Apache needs to read your virtualenv to
start Python interpreters in it – so we create virtualenvs in/opt/gitby convention:# as git user
virtualenv /opt/git/env
source /opt/git/env/bin/activate
pip install gitzebo
gitzebo-schema createAfter you’ve done so, you can bring up a development server to test it out.
This will let you reach gitzebo athttp://{hostname_or_ip}:8081/:# as git user
gitzebo-dev-serverOr you can jump directly to generating a mod_wsgi configuration using a
helper utility.  This will let you reach gitzebo athttp://{hostname}/:# as root user
# TODO: yet to be implemented
rpm -q httpd || yum -y install httpd
rpm -q mod_wsgi || yum -y install mod_wsgi
gitzebo-generate-conf > /etc/httpd/conf.d/gitzebo.conf
service httpd restartYour Apache instance’s configuration directory will vary on Debian or
Ubuntu, as will the command to restart Apache.Once you have an instance running, you can use the usernameadminwith the passwordadminto log in.Either way, once you’ve logged in:change the password.Why Reinvent the Wheel?!GitHub, gitorious, GitLab, and gitolite all exist already.  Why not use one of
these?The answers come down to requirements:easy to set upI dislike playing with configuration files for hours at a time to get
software working.  Applications should work with a minimum amount of
documentation reading.  Applications should work with a minimum amount of
manual steps required to get them running.  Ideally, installing an
application and deploying it should take one to three commandline
invocations.easy to useIf an application is slow, unintuitive, or fails to solve a user’s problems,
then it will go unused.in-house deploymentI have a bone to pick with software-as-a-service (SaaS).  As a rule,
I don’t like giving up
my proprietary datasets.  This dislike scales up with business value of
the data: I dislike the idea of giving up a folder of dog pictures I’ve
downloaded from the internet to use as wallpapers.  You’d think it’s
useless, and there’s no point to being protective: but even that data can
be used as a training dataset for artificial intelligences dealing with
visual classification…   Scale it up to source code, configuration
management, and monitoring?  Those three are the absolute keys to your
IT kingdom.  My source code management solution will not be SaaS.lightweightI don’t necessarily want a bug tracker and pretty graphs and the like.
The going Linux/UNIX philosophy is to keep each component as lightweight
and focused as possible, which is something I like.  I took away points
for doing too much, which it seemed all git management solutions did.The four de-facto solutions each violated one of these requirements:GitHubGitHub is software-as-a-service.gitoriousgitorious is not easy to set up.
Deployment on RHEL/CentOS 6 is a pain.You can read more here.I gave up on this approach after a while.GitLabGitLab was not easy to use due to performance issues.
I got GitLab running in a VM with 1GB of memory and a dedicated core.  Its
performance with two users was slow enough to regularly invoke vulgarities.
I don’t know if I missed some key setting, but we flagged it a no-go.gitolitegitolite also failed the ease-of-use test.
gitolite does not have a web application for management built in, so I’d
have to add one to meet my requirements.  As such, it’s more of a library
or back-end than a full-blown application.  It being written in Perl and
not having a well-defined API made me extremely nervous, as it seemed like
adding a web front-end would be difficult.