Maddi's Git Manager

Hi there! This is a piece of software I wrote for myself to manage my own git repositories on a private server.

I do a lot of work on my own hobby projects by myself, so I didn't need anything collaborative or too complicated. Plus with GitHub being a bit shady with training AI I liked the idea of having my own server.

Function

With git-manager, you have a central admin repository that contains a config.xml file. This file defines the layout of all your git repositories. Here you can create new repositories by cloning the repository, adding a new repository to config.xml, and pushing the changes back to the remote. A post-receive hook then runs git-manager switch which causes git-manager to update your server's state to match that described in config.xml.

git-manager places all your repositories in a central store directory, then symlinks those directories out to other directories. This allows you to keep your repositories in a central directory, making things like backups easier, while making it easy to create a sensible file structure that makes it simpler to find the repository you're looking for.

git-manager makes it easy to manage remote hooks too, allowing you to define pre-receive, update, and post-receive hooks. This is useful for doing things like forwarding on changes to GitHub and is how the admin repository runs git-manager itself.

Example admin repository

<!-- An example admin repository. -->
<repo name="admin">
  <symlink>admin</symlink>
  <!-- Run `git-manager switch` when pushed. -->
  <post-receive>
    #!/usr/bin/env bash
    cd ..
    git --git-dir=.git reset --hard
    /home/git/.cargo/bin/git-manager switch
  </post-receive>
</repo>

Example repository pushing upstream

This post-receive hook will fail the first time, but once you add your server's SSH keys to GitHub, and make an initial push manually from the server with something like git push -u github main to accept GitHub's public key, this hook should forward on changes on the main branch up to GitHub.

<!-- An example pushing to upstream. -->
<repo name="2025-03-21-git-manager">
  <symlink>git-manager</symlink>
  <tag>github</tag>
  <post-receive>
    #!/usr/bin/env bash
    cd ..
    export GIT_DIR=.git
    # Reset
    git reset --hard
    # Ensure the github remote exists
    REMOTES=$(git remote)
    if ! [[ $REMOTES = *"github"* ]]; then
      git remote add github git@github.com:MadelineBaggins/git-manager.git
    fi
    # Push to the github remote
    git push -u github main
  </post-receive>
</repo>

git-manager also has a git-manager search command that allows you to search for repositories and is planned to be compatible with my upcoming smartget project.

Installation

To install the git-manager binary on your git server, make sure cargo is installed on your git server (I know, overkill), then run cargo install maddi-git-manager. This will download and install the binary. I'll eventually package this in some common distributions, but until then, this is the best way to go about it.

If you want to update git-manager in the future, just run cargo install maddi-git-manager again.

Now run git-manager init server. It will prompt you to add flags that define the default branch name, in addition to the store directory and a root directory for symlinks to be created.

You'll can find the admin repository inside the store or follow the symlink that was created inside the symlinks directory.

Use

under construction

License

This software is licensed under the GPLv3. The full text of this license can be found in LICENSE at the project's root.

I'm more than happy to relicense my code for other open source projects so just reach out if you need something more permissive.

Copyright 2025 Madeline Baggins declanbaggins@gmail.com