HowTo: Set up Merecat with cgit

December 9, 2021 - 2 mins read

merecat

This post details how to set up cgit with Merecat httpd. It began as a GitHub issue report by Mr Alok G. Singh, who had run into problems setting it up, and ended up as a HowTo.

My server has several sub-domains set up, hence I run Merecat with the virtual-host = true setting and bind mounts in /var/www/. Detailed in the online documentation.

Setting up cgit requires a bit of linking & symlinking on top of the bind mounts, at least on Debian/Ubuntu. The bundled cgit package is installed into both /usr/share and /usr/lib, and when Merecat has chrooted those directories will not be available. I’ve bind mounted my /usr/share/cgit to /var/www/cgit.troglobit.com and linked the cgit.cgi from ../../lib/cgit/:

root@example:/usr/share/cgit# ll
total 1000
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root   4096 Mar 30 11:16 ./
drwxr-xr-x 140 root root   4096 Mar 30 09:39 ../
-rwxr-xr-x   2 root root 986800 Feb 12  2016 cgit.cgi*
-rw-r--r--   1 root root  13312 Feb 12  2016 cgit.css
-rw-r--r--   1 root root   1278 Feb 12  2016 cgit.png
-rw-r--r--   1 root root   1078 Feb 12  2016 favicon.ico
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root     22 Mar 30 11:16 filters -> ../../lib/cgit/filters/
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root      8 Mar 30 10:16 index.cgi -> cgit.cgi*
-rw-r--r--   1 root root     47 Feb 12  2016 robots.txt

Merecat httpd currently does not support URL rewrite, so I’ve set up cgit as follows, /etc/cgitrc:

# cgit config

css=/cgit.css
logo=/cgit.png

# Prepend this to all URLs
virtual-root=/cgit.cgi/

# Home of all GIT repos
scan-path=/srv/git/

# if you do not want that webcrawler (like google) index your site
robots=noindex, nofollow

Note the leading slash in the virtual-root. The resulting site can be viewed here: http://cgit.troglobit.com