OpenBSD cgit About Filters Hack

| bsd |

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.

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

[RODEN] Enrique Allen

Roden Readers — The first memory I have of Enrique Allen is from the campus of Stanford. He had just graduated from the d.school and was teaching part-time. We were about to start working together. He was all bounding lightness. That’s the first image: Jum…

via Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer November 21, 2024

17/11/2024

# Back in May I wrote about being inspired to write a track based on a YouTube comment. I recorded a test not long after and built on that into June. Then the breakdown struck and I had a massive crisis of confidence alongside the depression and anxiety. I …

via Colin Walker - Daily Feed November 21, 2024

Cold reading an ADHD affliction

I'm sure there are truly pathological cases of ADHD out there, and maybe taking amphetamines really is a magic pill for some folks. But there clearly is also an entire cottage industry cropping up around convincing perfectly normal people that they …

via David Heinemeier Hansson November 20, 2024

Generated by openring