Configuring goblet

Goblet can be run without any configuration for a quick test, using the built-in webserver. This is not suitable for any production environment, but is very helpful to see if all parts work. Change directory to a directory that contains one or more git repositories and start goblet:

cd /home/dennis/code
GOBLET_DEBUG=1 python -mgoblet

This places werkzeug (the underlying wsgi library) in debug mode. Never do this in production, as it allows people to execute arbitrary code on your server.

Goblet configuration

Goblet itself takes only a few configuration variables to alter its behaviour. Most important are the root directory for all repositories and the logging settings. The configuration is actually python code, so you can do interesting tricks with it. The goblet tarball ships an example configuration with all parameters and documentation for all of them, please refer to it when creating your own configuration.

uwsgi configuration

The prefered way to serve flask applications like goblet, is to use uwsgi and a webserver that speaks the wsgi protocol. A document example config is shipped with goblet. You will need to modify it to your reality (filesystem paths) and then you can run it. Do not run uwsgi as root, but create a special user account to run uwsgi or use the same user as for your webserer (www-data on Debian/Ubuntu) and configure uwsgi to switch to that user.

Once configured, it can be started with:

sudo uwsgi --ini /path/to/uwsgi.ini

And killed again with:

sudo uwsgi --stop /run/uwsgi.pid

Webserver configuration

I use nginx to serve goblet, and the example config shipped with goblet is the same as the one I use, except for some filesystem paths and the hostname. The configuration integrates goblet, git’s http-backend for serving the actual repositories, and lets you serve files in your repository root as well. If you make goblet work using another httpd, please share your configuration.

fcgiwrap

To make nginx execute the git smart http backend, you will also need to install and run fcgiwrap. Make sure you edit its initscript and add a line that says:

export HOME=/nonexistent

If you do not do this, git will try to read /root/.gitconfig, which it cannot do.

Repository configuration

Per-repository configuration is not needed either, but like gitweb, goblet can read some information from the git configuration.

• A description for the repository is read from the .git/description file.
• The owner of the repository is determined from filesystem permissions, but can be overridden by setting the goblet.owner variable in a repository.
• You can tell your visitors where to clone your repositories from. The default is to determine it from the CLONE_URLS_BASE variable in goblet.conf, but can be overridden per repository by setting goblet.clone_url_ssh (and _git, and _http)