> We’re building Gitlip - the collaborative devtool for the AI era. An all-in-one combination of Git-powered version control, collaborative coding and 1-click deployments.<p>Did they get a waiver from the git team to name it as such?<p>Per the trademark policy, new “git${SUFFIX}” names aren’t allowed: <a href="https://git-scm.com/about/trademark" rel="nofollow">https://git-scm.com/about/trademark</a><p>>> In addition, you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a third-party product or service without Conservancy's written permission. For the avoidance of doubt, this provision applies even to third-party marks that use the Marks as a syllable or as part of a portmanteau to refer to a product or service's use of Git code.
Github doesn't stop me from making an infinite number of git repos. Or maybe they do, but I have never hit the limit. And if I am hitting that limit, and become a large enterprise customer, I am sure they would work with me on getting around that limit.<p>Where does this fit into a product? Maybe I am blind, but while this is cool, I don't really see where I would want this.
> It allows us to easily host an infinite number of repositories<p>I like this system in general, but I don't understand why scaling the number of repos is treated as a pinch point? Are there git hosts that struggle with the number of repos hosted in particular? (I don't think the "Motivation" section answers this, either.)
> <i>After extensive research, we rewrote significant parts of Emscripten to support asynchronous file system calls.</i><p>> <i>We ended up creating our own Emscripten filesystem on top of Durable Objects, which we call DOFS.</i><p>> <i>We abandoned the porting efforts and ended up implementing the missing Git server functionality ourselves by leveraging libgit2’s core functionality, studying all available documentation, and painstakingly investigating Git’s behavior.</i><p>Using a ton of great open source & taking it all further. Would sure be great if ya'll could contribute some of this forward!<p>Libgit2 is GPL with Linking Exception, and Emscripten MIT so I think legally everything is in the clear. But it sure would be such a boon to share.
@plesiv could you please elaborate on how repack/gc is handled with a libgit2 backend? I know that Alibaba has done something similar in the past based on libgit2, but I have yet to see another implementation in the wild like this.<p>Very cool project. I hope Cloudflare workers can support more protocols like SSH and GRPC. It's one of the reasons why I prefer Fly.io over Cloudflare worker for special servers like this.
Somewhat related question.
Assume I have ~1k ~200MB XML files that get ~20% of their content changed. What are my best option to store them? While using vanilla git on a SSD raid10 works, that's quite slow in retrieving historical data dating back ~3-6 months. Are there other options for a quickie back-end? I'm fine with it being not that storage efficient to a degree.
Not having a technical limit is nice, because then it’s a matter of spending money. But whenever I see “infinite,” I ask what it will cost. How expensive is it to host git repos this way?<p>As a hobbyist, “free” is pretty appealing. I’m pretty sure my repos on GitHub won’t cost me anything, and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. Not sure about the new stuff.
Not the main purpose of the article but they mention they were working on a notetaking app oriented towards developers - did anything ever come of that? If not, does anyone know products that might fit this niche? (I currently use obsidian)
this leverages Durable Objects, but as i remember from two years ago, DO's way of guaranteeing uniqueness is that there can only be once instance of that DO in the world.<p>what if there are two users who wants to access the same DO repo at the same time, one in the US and the other in Singapore? the DO must live either in US servers or SG servers, but not at the same time. so one of the two users must have high latency then?<p>then after some time, a user in Australia accesses this DO repo - the DO bounces to AU servers - US and SG users will have high latency?<p>but please correct me if i'm wrong
> Wanting to avoid managing the servers ourselves, we experimented with a serverless approach.<p>I must be getting old but building a gigantic house of card of interlinked components only to arrive to a more limited solution is truly bizarre to me.<p>The maintenance burden for a VPS: periodically run apt update upgrade. Use filesystem snapshots to create periodic backups. If something happens to your provider, spin up a new VM elsewhere with your last snapshot.<p>The maintenance burden for your solution: Periodically merge upstream libgit2 in your custom fork, maintain your custom git server code and audit it for vulnerabilities, make sure everything still compiles with emscripten, deploy it. Rotate API keys to make sure your database service can talk to your storage service and your worker service. Then I don't even know how you'd backup all this to get it back online quickly if something happened to cloudflare. And all that only to end up with worse latency than a VPS, and more size constraints on the repo and objects.<p>But hey, at least it scales infinitely!
I've been wondering what to do to backup our github repos other than keeping a local copy and/or dumping them on something like S3.<p>I would love to use this to serve as a live/working automatic backup for my github repos on CF infrastructure.
The latency on the examples seems quite slow, around 7 seconds to a full load for me.<p><a href="https://gitlip.com/@nataliemarleny/test-repo" rel="nofollow">https://gitlip.com/@nataliemarleny/test-repo</a>
Engaging read! For me, just the right balance of technical detail and narrative content. It's a hard balance to strike and I'm sure preferences vary widely which makes it an impossible target for every audience.
This picked my interest as I am working on a Git product and using Cloudflare Workers for most of my back-end. I looked through the options, but the hard limit for Cloudflare workers and the fact that most interesting repos (that is companies you want to sell to) have repos in the Gbs means the platform is not fit for this.<p>I am ending up with AWS lambdas. Not only that solves the Wasm issue but you can have up to 10Gb of memory on a single instance. That is <i>close</i> to enough for most use cases. 100Mb? Not really.
This is really cool! I've been building something on libgit2 + EFS, and this approach is really interesting.<p>Between libgit2 on emscripten, the number of file writes to DO, etc, how is performance?
I wonder if they considered or looked at using JGit? <a href="https://github.com/eclipse-jgit/jgit">https://github.com/eclipse-jgit/jgit</a><p>It provides client and server API. The latter is used by Gerrit for its server. <a href="https://www.gerritcodereview.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.gerritcodereview.com</a><p>Not sure what the Java to WASM story is if that is a requirement for what they need.
This is a very impressive technical achievement, and it's clear that a lot of work went into it.<p>Unfortunately, the entrepreneur in me continues that thought with "work that could have gone into finding customers instead". Now you have a system that could store "infinite" git repos, but how many customers?
this is very cool!<p>i prototyped a similar serverless git product recently using a different technique.<p>i used aws lambda holding leases in dynamo backed by s3. i zipped git binaries into the lambda and invoked them directly. i used shallow clone style repos stored in chunks in s3, that could be merged as needed in lambda /tmp.<p>lambda was nice because for cpu heavy ops like merging many shallow clones, i could do that in a larger cpu lambda, and cache the result.<p>other constraints were similar to what is described here. mainly that an individual push/pull cannot exceed the api gateway max payload size, a few MB.<p>i looked at isomorphic, but did not try emscripten libgit2. using cloudflare is nice because of free egress, which opens up many new use cases that don’t make sense on $0.10/GB egress.<p>i ended up shelving this while i build a different product. glad to see others pursuing the same thing, serverless git is an obvious win! do you back your repos with r2?<p>for my own git usage, what i ended up building was a trustless git system backed by dynamo and s3 directly. this removes the push/pull size limit, and makes storage trustless. this uses git functionality i had no idea about prior, git bundle and unbundle[1]. they are used for transfer of git objects without a server, serverless git! this one i published[2].<p>good luck with your raise and your project. looking forward to the next blog. awesome stuff.<p>1. <a href="https://git-scm.com/docs/git-bundle" rel="nofollow">https://git-scm.com/docs/git-bundle</a><p>2. <a href="https://github.com/nathants/git-remote-aws">https://github.com/nathants/git-remote-aws</a>