Next to my day job as a Scala developer, I am, on occasion, giving Git workshops (shameless plug). While explaining all things Git, I also need to refer to a few Git repositories for demonstration purposes. Normally I hosted these on Github and told the attendees to pull from there.
I saw a few problems with that setup
- Implicitly endorsing one vendor over another
- People need to be registered at that vendor
While I believe that Github is doing great work, I don’t really want to promote their services over other services such as Gitlab or Bitbucket or any other solution for that matter. I also didn’t want to make people signup for on or the other service, if they made other choices for themselves already.
In addition to that, I often want to show or share some impromptu repository, which I don’t want to host on any of these services.
It’s a distributed system, right? I should be able to host them anywhere right?! So, let’s host them on my machine!
I still wanted a nice short and speaking url, though. Tunneling to the rescue.
Setup tunnel
Install ngrok
brew cask install ngrok
Sign up with ngrok
Get your authorization token here and add it
ngrok authtoken <token>
Configuration
The configuration file is at $HOME/.ngrok2/ngrok.yml. You will already find a token entry.
Let’s define a tunnel:
authtoken: <token>
tunnels:
git:
proto: http
addr: 8174
region: eu
hostname: git.oschrenk.com
To use a custom domain, you need to pay for ngrok.
Have a registered domain, where you manipulate the CNAME entries of subdomains.
Reserve a domain in ngrok here (choose an appropiate region, I did Europe). Follow the instructions to create custom domains inside ngrok here.
Run git daemon
git clone https://github.com/gittogreat/git-http-server2
cd git-http-server2
npm install -g
Serve repositories
Create a directory to serve repositories from
cd $HOME
mkdir Repos
cd Repos
Create a demo repository
git init --bare demo
Find out the public IP of your attendees (this assumes you are all behind the same IP)
curl ifconfig.co/ip
31.151.65.24
Serve repositories
git-http-server2 --ip 31.151.65.24 --allowcreation /Users/oliver/Repos &
listening on http://0.0.0.0:8174 in /Users/oliver/Repos
Start tunnel
ngrok start git
Usage
Now you can not only serve all kinds of repositories but you can also allow your attendees to share their creations with you!
The command line flag --allowcreation allows for pushing repositories to your machine even if they don’t exist yet! They will automatically be created!
To have Jane push her repository to your machine just tell her:
git remote add origin git@git.oschrenk.com:jane/hello.git
git push
Tada! You have the repository and can show the group some things