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Today I Learned -- Git's built-in website

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By Joseph Hale, MS SE 1 min read
A screenshot of the Git Web landing page for Joseph Hale's "Git Authorship" project.
A screenshot of the Git Web landing page for Joseph Hale's "Git Authorship" project.

Today I learned that Git ships with a built-in web interface for a code repository. Here’s how to set it up!

  1. Open a terminal
  2. Navigate to a Git repository on your computer
  3. Start the instaweb server with git instaweb --local --httpd=webrick
  4. Open a web browser to localhost:1234 to explore your git repository.

On my system (Ubuntu 24.04 in WSL) I also had to sudo apt install libcgi-session-perl since the Git Web server uses CGI scripts on its backend.

And that’s it!

I thought it was really neat to see how smooth the setup was. I’ve previously seen these types of Git repositories hosted online (e.g. the RSS reader TTRSS), so it was fun to learn how those work behind the scenes.

Git Today I Learned
This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.