Can You Dig It?

Like many of you I keep mirrors of my projects on a small VPS — partly as insurance, GitHub is lovely until it isn’t, and partly because I like having my own corner of the web. For years gitweb did the honors, showing its age but doing the job. When I went looking for something nicer I found legit, which looks great — but on my single-core droplet it pegged the CPU just rendering a repo page. Add the AI scraper herds that graze on every public git frontend these days, and the poor machine never had a quiet moment.

So, obviously, the reasonable thing to do was to write my own. Say hello to digit, which just shipped v1.0.

Display Git

The name came first, I’ll admit it. Digit — display git. Dig it? It also means finger, so it keeps a finger on your repos. The puns run deep, and picking the heading for the README was among the harder design decisions of the project.

Under the hood the design is old-school: digit is a single static Go binary that shells out to the real git for everything, just like gitweb and cgit before it. The git binary has decades of packfile and commit-graph optimizations that pure-Go reimplementations simply lack — that’s the difference between browsing a kernel-sized repo and melting a droplet. On top of that sits an aggressive cache: every page carries an ETag derived from the repo’s actual ref state, hash-pinned URLs are marked immutable forever, and the scraper herds that inspired the whole exercise now graze on a diet of 304s. A bundled robots.txt and fail2ban-friendly logs handle the ones that don’t take the hint.

What It Does

Everything you’d expect from the classic tier — trees, logs, diffs, blame, refs, snapshots — plus the things I always missed there:

• Mirror-tree aware — repos nested host/org/repo.git, the way mirror scripts lay them out, get grouped per org with index pages at every level. My whole /srv/git just works.
• GitHub-grade markdown — emoji, tables, alerts (> [!TIP]), relative links and images, plus readme tabs for license, contributing, and friends. Your project pages look like project pages, not like 2004.
• Read-only clone over smart HTTP with a GitHub-style clone menu — copyable HTTPS/SSH URLs and tar.gz/zip snapshots. Handy for an office-internal instance, off by default for public ones.
• Atom and RSS feeds, per repo and site-wide, commit message search, .patch URLs, dark mode with a proper toggle, and line anchors with GitHub-style visual range marks:

Features that cost CPU, bandwidth, or attack surface — blame, snapshots, clone, search — sit behind config toggles, cgit style, so every instance is exactly as wide as its operator wants.

Grab It

Building is the boring kind of boring:

git clone https://github.com/troglobit/digit.git
cd digit
make
sudo make install

Prebuilt static binaries for linux amd64/arm64 hang off the v1.0 release, and the README covers configuration, reverse proxying with nginx or merecat, and running under systemd or Finit.

Best of all: you can see it in action right now, browsing its own source, at git.troglobit.com. Bug reports and patches welcome, as always. Can you dig it?