I have been looking for a simple solution to expose my code projects (all version-controlled by Git) to the outside world. I am not satisfied with GitHub for reasons I will not talk about in this post.

I was pretty happy with a self-hosted GitLab instance, until I tried setting up SSL on it, broke it, had to start from scratch, and found out the hard way that I didn’t have local copies of all my projects (and a quick search through my bootable backup didn’t turn up what I was looking for). I still had the files, I just lost some Git history on a few minor ‘projects’ (Homebrew taps).

When I think about it, I don’t really need much from a repository host. A quick contemplation tells me I have these requirements:

• Web view of projects
  • Branches
    • Files
      • Syntax highlighting
    • Readme front and centre
• SSH pull/push
• Easy hook setup

I don’t need pull/merge requests, because it’s just for personal use, so all merging would happen outside of the web view. That also means no diff view. Comments doesn’t really matter, as there’s no social aspect to it.

Even the requirements listed above aren’t that important. The absolute necessities are basically cloning ability, listing projects, and showing the README.

I need to think about this further.