How to setup a browseable source code repository in minutes.

Posted on May 4, 2010
Tags: , ,
Browsing source code repositories (such as git, subversion, etc) just by using the command line client is very cumbersome. Fortunately, there are web-repository browsers available, which - once set up - allow the user to browse the source code with his web-browser. The company haven’t had one, I needed one badly, so I was looking for solutions.

Bella and Thomas

What I needed, was actually very simple: a read-only checkout of a selected set of repositories, which are constantly updated and therefore browse-able.

I first tried tailor and … failed. The documentation is not very extensive and if you try to solve an authentication issue with three components involved (ssh, tailor and git) you’re burning time.

I thought a better way is possibly by using git-svn. I wrote a little bash script, which clones a list of source code repositories and updates them constantly. Because the whole thing took me about an hour to setup, I thought it would be prudent to share the little piece of code with the outside world. Maybe someone feels lucky and needs something similar: 
#!/bin/bash
# the directory in which all repositories are mirrored
ROOT=$HOME/repos
SCRIPTROOT=$HOME/bin
# repository urls
SVNROOT=svn://svn.urltoyourrepsitory.net/repo
GITROOT=ssh://git.urltoyourrepository.net/repo
# list seperated by newline with the names of all repositories
GITREPOSITORIES=`cat $SCRIPTROOT/gitrepositories`
REPOSITORIES=`cat $SCRIPTROOT/svnrepositories`
AUTHORSFILE=$SCRIPTROOT/svnauthors

rebase_only() {
 if test -d $1; then
 cd $1;
 echo "Rebase in " `pwd`;
 case $2 in
 svn)
 git svn rebase;
 ;;
 *)
 git pull --rebase;
 esac
 cd $ROOT;
 fi;
}

cd $ROOT;

for repo in $REPOSITORIES; do
 rebase_only $repo "svn";
 if !(test -d $repo); then
 echo "creating new repo" $repo
 git svn clone -A$AUTHORSFILE $SVNROOT/$repo;
 fi;
done;

for repo in $GITREPOSITORIES; do
 tmp=${repo##*/};
 reponame=${tmp%*.git};
 rebase_only $reponame "git";
 if !(test -d $reponame); then
 echo "creating new git repo" $repo;
 git clone $GITROOT/$repo;
 fi;
done;