How to chose the right language to build a git server web application like github?

Question

Hi,

I wish to create a git server for which I wish developers in my team to access their git repos through HTTP/git protocol by a web application. I want to develop this solution fairly in a short amount of time and i have to depend on the existing tools to do this. I am having a dilemma of choosing java/python/ruby(rails) for this purpose. Gitosis is in python, so Can I write my app in java and use gitosis to access the details of a git repo. Or should I use just python compulsarily to access git through gitosis ? Is there any other good and complete tool like gitosis for java ? I hope All these questions will lead me to choose the language in which I must implement the server code of the web application.

I am not an experience web developer so please guide me on this. Which is the right language for implementing the server code for this web application ?

Answer 1

You can use gitorious for this purpose:

http://www.gitorious.org/gitorious/pages/UbuntuInstallation

It's a headache to get set up and working but worth the effort. Definitely beats developing your own solution.

Answer 2

I don't quite understand what you want to do. Could you elaborate?

Do you want to create git hosting site / git forge like GitHub, but you want to host it and do not want to shell money for GitHub:FI? If it is true, then you can use one of existing open source git hosting software (see InterfacesFrontendsAndTools page on Git wiki):

• Gitorious (in Ruby, like GitHub)
• InDefero (in PHP)
• Girocco (powers repo.or.cz, in Perl and bash)

Gitosis (or similar Gitolite tool) are about access control to Git repositories via git, and are managed from a command line, not from web.

If you want to create git forge or web interface for git repository management, take a look at Gerrit, which is web based code review and project management for Git based projects, written in Java and using JGit (implementation of Git in Java) and Mina SSH daemon. It was described in Gerrit: Google-style code review meets git at LWN.net.