git equivalent of 'hg serve'?

Question

Is there some sort of addon you can use to have a git equivalent of the Mercurial

hg serve

('hg serve' starts a local web-server which allows you to browse the repository history/branches etc)

Solution 1

I think what you're looking for is git instaweb.

By default it uses lighttpd, but any other web server like webrick also should work.

I prefer webrick because it is much convenient (and I have ruby and webrick gem installed)

Examples:

# Starts a web server on port 1234 and opens up a web browser
git instaweb --httpd=webrick

# To stop webrick
git instaweb --httpd=webrick --stop

You should be able to configure the instaweb settings in your .git/config or ~/.gitconfig and merely run git instaweb --start and git instaweb --stop to control instaweb:

[instaweb]
    local = true
    httpd = webrick
    port = 1234
    browser = chromium

UPDATE:

git-webui which alberthier mentioned in his answer, is actually a much richer UI compared to the default instaweb and installation is also really straight-forward.

Solution 2

For just browsing files and revisions git instaweb is the right solution.

In addition if you want to set-up an ad-hoc git server for sharing work (push/pull) with some colleagues (which hg serve also allows you to do), you can use:

git daemon --reuseaddr --base-path=. --export-all --verbose --enable=receive-pack

Your colleagues will use it with something like:

git clone git://<ip-address>/.git project

Addition 1:

If you want to be able to push to this server, you need to add the --enable=receive-pack option (Thanks to Dominik below).

Addition 2:

It just happened to me so I add it to the answer :-), if you are using a Redhat-based Linux distribution (RHEL, CentOS, etc.) and have an error "git: 'daemon' is not a git command.", then you need to install a seperate package for it:

sudo yum install git-daemon

Solution 3

git-webui is a git extension which provides a web based user interface and the ability to clone/pull from other computers

https://github.com/alberthier/git-webui

$ cd my_git_repo
$ git webui

Other people can

$ git clone http://<ip-of-your-computer>:8000/ repoclone

or

$ git pull http://<ip-of-your-computer>:8000/

Comments

[glaucon]

Excellent - thanks very much. I did use lightttpd instead of webrick and because I wanted to view the results outside the machine I was working on I set 'local = false'. Worked fine.

[Tuxdude]

@alberthier - git-webui looks really good and installation is really straightforward as well :)

[fbmd]

With git 2.1.1 on Cygwin, git instaweb yields git: 'instaweb' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.

[Dominik]

Got fatal: remote error: access denied or repository not exported: REPO using the Git server. On server side: 'receive-pack': service not enabled for DIR/REPO. The solution is to add --enable=receive-pack (see @itsadok's answer)

[Christophe Muller]

Thanks @Dominik, I will add this tip to the answer. Without this you can pull but not push.

[blobmaster]

This should be the accepted answer as hg serve allow cloning.