dgit: Git forge on Durable Objects

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Summary

dgit is a git server implementation using Cloudflare Durable Objects, enabling decentralized, serverless git hosting with full protocol support and a web interface.

<p>Demo site: <a href="https://git.littledivy.com/" rel="ugc">https://git.littledivy.com/</a></p> <p><a href="https://lobste.rs/s/vbaang/dgit_git_forge_on_durable_objects">Comments</a></p>
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Cached at: 08/19/26, 02:26 AM

littledivy/dgit

Source: https://github.com/littledivy/dgit

dgit

Durable git.

dgit is a git server for Cloudflare Workers and for your own machines with celld. Each repository is a Durable Object: a small server with a name and a private SQLite database that holds the repository’s objects and refs, speaks the git smart HTTP protocol to a stock git client, and renders a cgit-style web interface. There is no origin server, no filesystem, and no GitHub in the critical path. A repository nobody touches costs almost nothing, and applications shard by construction: one hot repository cannot slow another. Reads are public; pushes authenticate; pushing to a name that does not exist creates the repository.

How it works

dgit implements git in TypeScript: pkt-line framing, packfile parsing with ofs- and ref-delta resolution, pack generation over a streaming SHA-1, commit/tree/tag codecs, and a Myers diff. The one dependency is pako, for zlib.

A push streams into the repository’s cell and is stored as the packfile the client sent; an index maps each object id to its pack, offset, and delta base, so the client’s compression is preserved rather than re-derived. A clone walks the closure of the requested refs and copies the stored compressed bytes verbatim into the outgoing pack. Fetch negotiation excludes the closure of the client’s haves, cut correctly at shallow boundaries, so an incremental fetch downloads only what is missing. Shallow clones (--depth, deepening, --unshallow), thin packs, side-band progress, forced updates, and ref deletion behave as they do against any git server.

The web interface is the cgit surface: summary, refs, log with search and per-path history, tree, blob with syntax highlighting, blame, commit and arbitrary-range diffs, format-patch output that applies cleanly with git am, tar.gz and zip snapshots of any ref, about pages rendered from the README, atom feeds, and commit-activity statistics. Repositories carry a description, an owner, a section on the index page, and a private flag that hides them and gates every read behind the push token.

Deploy to Cloudflare

npm install
npx wrangler deploy
npx wrangler secret put GIT_TOKEN   # the push password

Then push anything:

git remote add origin https://<your-host>/myrepo.git
git push -u origin main

A Workers request is bounded at 128MB of memory and five minutes of CPU, so a very large history lands as a series of smaller pushes rather than one; day-to-day pushes, clones, and fetches fit comfortably. A full-history clone of a repository with millions of objects can exceed the CPU bound — shallow and incremental fetches of the same repository are fine.

Self-host on celld

celld runs the same Worker against a bucket you own, with none of the managed platform’s request bounds. Set a real GIT_TOKEN var in wrangler.celld.jsonc first:

celld deploy wrangler.celld.jsonc --bucket s3://my-cells --endpoint https://...
CELLD_V8_HEAP_LIMIT_MB=4096 CELLD_LTX_DURABILITY_TIMEOUT_SECS=180 \
celld --bucket s3://my-cells --endpoint https://... \
  --listen 0.0.0.0:8080 --internal-listen 10.0.0.1:8081 --advertise 10.0.0.1:8081

Each repository’s SQLite database replicates to the bucket; nodes are disposable, and a killed node’s repositories come back bit-identical. The heap and durability-deadline variables give large single-cell ingests the room the defaults do not.

Operate

curl -X PUT  -u x:$GIT_TOKEN -d '{"description":"...","section":"tools","private":false}' \
  https://<host>/myrepo/config                       # describe and place a repository
curl -X POST -u x:$GIT_TOKEN https://<host>/myrepo/gc    # prune unreachable objects
curl -X DELETE -u x:$GIT_TOKEN https://<host>/myrepo     # delete a repository

Garbage collection also runs by itself, from a Durable Object alarm, after a forced update or a ref deletion. GIT_TOKENS holds additional comma-separated tokens; MAX_PUSH_MB caps a single push.

Contributions

Pull requests are disabled. Send a git format-patch attachment to [email protected].

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