Show HN: My Private GitHub on Postgres

Source: Hacker News

Overview

GitGres is a starting point for private reimplementations of GitHub optimized for individual teams’ agent needs. GitHub is a fantastic site for sharing code and it is likely how you’re viewing this if you’re a human. GitGres exists to solve a few issues:

• Trading off cost for uptime. GitHub offers free code storage but less‑than‑stellar uptime. With GitGres, you have the flexibility to use a Postgres DBMS with tiered storage [1] to tune cost while maintaining uptime.
• Trading off latency for cost. GitHub puts you at the mercy of current system load. With GitGres, just choose your favorite Postgres cache [2].
• Trading off consistency for throughput. GitHub is a cloud service. If requests reach GitHub’s servers out of order, bad things can happen. GitGres is a server backed by Postgres. It can run locally or colocated with many agents. Consistency and throughput are fully tunable.

Everything—git objects, refs, packfiles, deltas, tokens, PRs, issues, comments, reviews, reactions, teams, orgs, events—lives in Postgres rows. The server holds nothing on disk.

Setup

# 1. Build (binaries land in ./target/release/{gitgres,git-remote-gitgres,gitgres-server}).
cargo build --release --bins

# 2. Have a Postgres reachable, e.g.:
export GITGRES_DB='host=localhost user=postgres dbname=gitgres'

# 3. Apply the schema (idempotent).
gitgres init

# 4. Boot the server. The first --bootstrap-token mints an admin token tied
#    to user 'demo' that you can use to manage everything else through the API.
gitgres serve --listen 0.0.0.0:8080 --bootstrap-token "$(openssl rand -hex 32)"

# (For TLS:)
gitgres serve --listen 0.0.0.0:8443 \
              --tls /path/cert.pem /path/key.pem \
              --bootstrap-token TOKEN

gitgres serve environment variables

Usage

Plain git (smart HTTP, v1 + v2)

git clone http://gitgres.host/owner/repo.git
git push http://demo:TOKEN@gitgres.host/owner/repo.git main

gh CLI

# Print a hosts.yml entry, drop into ~/.config/gh/hosts.yml:
gitgres gh-config --host gitgres.host --token TOKEN --user alice

# Or pipe a token into gh:
echo "TOKEN" | gh auth login --hostname gitgres.host --with-token

Supported gh commands (examples):

• gh pr create / list / view / merge / comment / close / diff
• gh issue create / list / view / comment / close
• gh repo create / view / clone / fork / list
• gh release create / list / view
• gh label create / list / edit / delete
• gh api /repos/owner/repo/... — the entire REST surface

Custom remote helper (alternative to smart HTTP)

git clone "gitgres::host=db.local user=u dbname=gitgres#owner/repo"

Limitations

GitGres currently does not support:

• Search
• Actions / workflows / runs / secrets
• SSH transport
• Webhooks
• HTTP/2
• Web UI

Citations