git - EuroTcl 2026, 16-17 of July, WU Vienna, Austria

I wanted to share the talk and chose Git as a means for it. Gustaf helped me figure out how to serve Git over HTTP with Naviserver and rewrote nscgi in Naviserver 5.1 to make the setup simpler. Here it is:

Git root

/srv/git, directory which holds any number of bare git repos.

CGI script

/srv/git/gt, we need to strip the /srv prefix from the PATH_INFO environment variable. Otherwise we could call git http-backend directly from Naviserver.

Naviserver

We need to add the GIT_PROJECT_ROOT environment variable so git needs to now where the repos are.

Naviserver configuration file snippet (Naviserver 5.1+ only):

ns_section ns/server/eurotcl2026/module/nscgi {
    ns_param   map "GET /git/*.git /srv/git"
    ns_param   map "POST /git/*.git /srv/git"
    ns_param   interps git
}
ns_section ns/interps/git {
    ns_param   .git {
        program /srv/git/gt
        env {GIT_PROJECT_ROOT /srv/git}
    }
}

/srv/git/gt

Since we use a script we could just call git http-backend which finds and exec's the real executable by itself. To spare the indirection I looked up where it is by hand. This shown executable path works on Debian GNU/Linux, but differs for other distributions or if git is installed from source.

#!/bin/sh
PATH_INFO=${SCRIPT_NAME#/git}$PATH_INFO
exec /usr/lib/git-core/git-http-backend