Lev Lazinskiy

OpenBSD cgit About Filters Hack

update - I moved from self-hosted cgit to sourcehut. Join me there!

Fri, 6 Dec 2019 21:22:36 -0800

I set up cgit recently on OpenBSD for the first time and I was surprised to see that the about filters do not seem to be working. Typically there are some built-in converters that convert markdown to html, man to text. I have no idea why this is missing and the only information that I was able to find about this was in the CVS changelog from 2018.

Disable the filter feature as it wouldn’t work with the way cgit.cgi is built statically for us.

If i try to set the readme option to a plain text README file, it does not seem to preserve line breaks, tabs or spaces and looks pretty strange.

Another option would be to simply write HTML to format my README.

The hack that I came up with is to write plain text and then wrap it in a <pre> tag.

In /var/www/conf/cgitrc I set readme=:README.html and then in the root of my repo I have a README.html file that looks like this:

<pre>
Blog
====

Source for the dev.levlaz.org website. This site is generating using 
ssg[1] which is a static site generator. The included Makefile provides 
some helper scripts to make working with ssg a bit easier.
</pre>

The end result you can see here.

Now, I just want to go figure out why the filters don’t work to begin with.