Gitblit is a lightweight Git server that is easy to use and install. It provides an intuitive web interface for managing Git repositories with fine-grained access controls, commit history viewing, and code reviews. In this tutorial, we will learn how to install Gitblit on MXLinux Latest operating system using the command line interface.
To follow this tutorial, you will need a computer running MXLinux Latest with sudo access, internet connectivity, and a web browser.
Before installing Gitblit, it is always a good idea to update the system package repositories using the following command:
sudo apt-get update
Gitblit requires the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to be installed on the system. Use the following command to install OpenJDK 8:
sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jdk
Go to the Gitblit website (https://www.gitblit.com/) and download the latest stable version of Gitblit. You can download either the ZIP archive or the tarball. For this tutorial, we will use the ZIP archive.
Use the following command to download Gitblit:
wget https://github.com/gitblit/gitblit/releases/download/v1.9.0/gitblit-1.9.0.zip
Use the following command to extract the Gitblit ZIP archive:
unzip gitblit-1.9.0.zip
This will create a new directory called gitblit-1.9.0.
Before running Gitblit, we need to configure some settings. Navigate to the gitblit-1.9.0/data directory and edit the gitblit.properties file using a text editor such as nano:
cd gitblit-1.9.0/data
nano gitblit.properties
In the gitblit.properties file, make the following changes:
server.httpPort = 8080
server.httpsPort = 8443
server.redirectToHttps = true
server.storePasswords = true
server.httpsPrivateKey = ssl/privatekey.pem
server.httpsCertificate = ssl/certificate.pem
Save and exit the file.
Gitblit requires SSL certificates to be installed for secure communication between the server and clients. We can generate self-signed SSL certificates for testing purposes. Use the following commands to generate the SSL certificates:
mkdir -p gitblit-1.9.0/ssl
cd gitblit-1.9.0/ssl
openssl req -new -x509 -keyout privatekey.pem -out certificate.pem -days 365 -nodes
This will create two new files in the gitblit-1.9.0/ssl directory:
Use the following command to start Gitblit:
java -jar gitblit.jar --baseFolder data
You should see the following output:
Gitblit GO! - gitblit version 1.9.0
Open your web browser and go to https://localhost:8443 to access Gitblit. You may need to accept the self-signed SSL certificate in your browser.
In this tutorial, we learned how to install Gitblit on MXLinux Latest operating system. Gitblit provides a lightweight Git server with an intuitive web interface for managing Git repositories. You can customize Gitblit to suit your needs by editing the gitblit.properties file.
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