Lev Lazinskiy

Installing cgit + nginx on Debian Jessie

cgit is a hyperfast web frontend for git repositories written in C. Coupled with nginx, this makes a super quick git repository viewer for your web server. I was not able to find a good tutorial on how to get this installed with nginx on a Debian server. The latest version of Debian Stable (Jessie) comes with cgit already in the repositories so a lot of previous tutorials that had you compile cgit are no longer necessary unless you really need the latest and greatest version of cgit.

Install some software

In order to run cgit with nginx, you will need to install cgit, nginx, and fcgiwrap.

sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install cgit nginx fcgiwrap

Configure your nginx.conf to work with cgit

The contents of /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file should look something like this:

worker_processes 1; 

events { 
  worker_connections 1024; 
} 

http { 
  include mime.types; 
  default_type application/octet-stream; 
  sendfile on;
  keepalive_timeout 65; 
  gzip on;

  server { 
     listen 80; 
     server_name git.example.com; # update to be your own domain
     root /usr/share/cgit;
     try_files $uri @cgit;

     location @cgit { 
      include fastcgi_params; 
      fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/lib/cgit/cgit.cgi; 
      fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $uri; 
      fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $args; 
      fastcgi_param HTTP_HOST $server_name; 
      fastcgi_pass unix:/run/fcgiwrap.socket; 
      } 
   }
}

Configure cgit Edit /etc/cgitrc

Your file should look like this:

#cgit config
#===========
#see cgitrc(5) for details
#=========================

css=/cgit.css 
logo=/cgit.png 
virtual-root=/

Fire it up!

Now you are ready to see cgit. Restart nginx and navigate to your web server.

/etc/init.d/nginx restart

You should see the cgit home screen at your domain name or IP address now.

Add some repos

You can add repos to your /etc/cgitrc file and they will show up in cgit. The repo section of this file should look something like this:

# List of repositories. 
# This list could be kept in a different file (e.g. '/etc/cgitrepos') 
# and included like this: 
# include=/etc/cgitrepos 

repo.url=MyRepo 
repo.path=/srv/git/MyRepo.git 
repo.desc=This is my git repository 
repo.url=MyOtherRepo 
repo.path=/srv/git/MyOtherRepo.git 
repo.desc=That's my other git repository

Since cgit is packaged in Debian now, getting up and running is easier than ever. If you ran into any issues following this guide let me know in the comments.

Credits: I got a lot of inspiration from this guide via the awesome Arch Wiki. There were some minor changes that had to be made due to some configuration differences between Arch and Debian.