dolt

Dolt

Dolt is a stand-alone Git repository browser. It can be used to explore repositories in your browser of choice, and features syntax highlighting with http://pygments.org/ and various markdown formats (see below). In addition to offering tree and blob browsing, Dolt also supports rendering the commit log and blame.

Installation

To install dolt you need Ruby, http://www.rubygems.org/ and Python development files. The Python development files are required to support Pygments syntax highlighting.

Systems using apt (Debian/Ubuntu, others)

# 1) Install Ruby and RubyGems
sudo apt-get install -y ruby rubygems

# 2) Install Python development files and unicode tools
sudo apt-get install -y python-dev libicu-dev

# 3) Install dolt. This may or may not require the use of sudo, depending on
#    how you installed Ruby.
gem install dolt

Systems using yum (Fedora/CentOS/RedHat, others)

# 1) Install Ruby and RubyGems
sudo yum install -y ruby rubygems

# 2) Install Python development files and unicode tools
sudo yum install -y python-devel libicu-devel

# 3) Install dolt. This may or may not require the use of sudo, depending on
#    how you installed Ruby.
gem install dolt

The dolt Command Line Interface

Dolt installs a binary, aptly named dolt on your system. This binary has only one required argument, the directory to serve repositories from. To try it out, simply enter a git repository from your terminal and enter

dolt .

This will start a dolt instance serving your current repository on [http://localhost:3000/](port 3000).

Dolt will serve either a single repository, like above, or a directory of git repositories. Let's say you have a directory /home/dolt/repositories containing a collection of bare Git repositories you push your work to over SSH. To serve all of these over the web, simply:

cd /home/dolt/repositories
dolt .

And you'll be presented with a list of the repositories you can browse.

The dolt binary supports a number of options, which can be listed using the --help switch. The following options are currently supported:

• --socket lets you specify a UNIX socket to listen to instead of a port. Enter the path to a socket.
• --port lets you specify a different port than 3000. Also supported through the environment variable PORT.
• --bind lets you bind to a different IP address than 0.0.0.0. Also supported through the environment variable IP.
• --tabwidth lets you specify how many spaces to use when rendering a tab in a source file
• --pidfile lets you specify the path to a pid file. Entering this option will daemonize the dolt process.
• --logfile lets you specify the path to a log file when running daemonized.

Please note that some of the options allowed can also be specified using environment variables. If no option is given to the CLI, the environment variable will be used if available, otherwise a default will be used.

To stop a running Dolt server, you'll need to do a little manual work:

kill `cat /path/to/dolt.pid`

A future version of Dolt/Gitorious will support stopping a running dolt server.

Deploying under "a real" web server

To make your repositories publicly available you could specify port as 80. However, to do this you need to be root on the machine, and it won't work if you're already running a web server on your computer.

A more practical solution is to have dolt listening on a socket (or port for that matter), daemonize it, and use your web server as a proxy in front of dolt.

A minimal nginx configuration which lets you do this could look like this (replace server_name with the host name you'll be using):

upstream dolt {
  server unix://tmp/dolt.sock fail_timeout=30s;
}

server {
  server_name git.zmalltalker.com;
  location / {
    proxy_pass http://dolt;
    proxy_redirect off;
  }
}

On Debian/Ubuntu, add this to /etc/nginx/sites-available/dolt, symlink this to /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/dolt and reload nginx:

service nginx reload

On CentOS, add the same contents to /etc/nginx/conf.d/dolt.conf and reload nginx:

service nginx reload

Rendering markup

Dolt uses [https://github.com/github/markup](GitHub Markup) to render different markup formats. In order to have Dolt render these, you need to install some different Ruby gems. These gems are not required to install Dolt, so you'll have to install the ones you need separately.

Markdown

To render files with suffixes .markdown, .mdown and md, install the redcarpet gem.

gem install redcarpet

Org-mode

To render http://org-mode.org/ files with a .org suffix, you'll need the org-ruby gem installed on your system.

gem install org-ruby

Textile

Rendering .textile files requires the RedCloth gem installed on your system.

gem install RedCloth

Other formats

To render other markup formats, have a look at the [https://github.com/github/markup](GitHub Markup) page.

Why dolt?

Dolt is an extraction of the new code browser in https://gitorious.org/gitorious/mainline. Setting up a full-blown Git repository hosting site just to make it possible to show your source code to the world feels like way too much work with the current situation. You could use git instaweb, but that's ridiculously ugly and only allows serving up a single repository.

Dolt uses http://libgit2.github.com for most git operations, and should perform a lot better than implementations primarily using the git command line tools to integrate with Git.

License

Dolt is free software licensed under the [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html](GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL)). Dolt is developed as part of the Gitorious project.