Stagit: a static git page generator

Last modification on 2021-04-11

stagit is a static page generator for git.

My git repository uses stagit, you can see how it looks here: https://codemadness.org/git/

Features

Log of all commits from HEAD.
Log and diffstat per commit.
Show file tree with linkable line numbers.
Show references: local branches and tags.
Detect README and LICENSE file from HEAD and link it as a webpage.
Detect submodules (.gitmodules file) from HEAD and link it as a webpage.
Atom feed of the commit log (atom.xml).
Atom feed of the tags/refs (tags.xml).
Make index page for multiple repositories with stagit-index.
After generating the pages (relatively slow) serving the files is very fast, simple and requires little resources (because the content is static), only a HTTP file server is required.
Security: all pages are static. No CGI or dynamic code is run for the interface. Using it with a secure httpd such as OpenBSD httpd it is privilege-separated, chroot(2)'d and pledge(2)'d.
Simple to setup: the content generation is clearly separated from serving it. This makes configuration as simple as copying a few directories and scripts.
Usable with text-browsers such as dillo, links, lynx and w3m.

Not suitable for large repositories (2000+ commits), because diffstats are an expensive operation, the cache (-c flag) or (-l maxlimit) is a workaround for this in some cases.
Not suitable for large repositories with many files, because all files are written for each execution of stagit. This is because stagit shows the lines of textfiles and there is no "cache" for file metadata (this would add more complexity to the code).
Not suitable for repositories with many branches, a quite linear history is assumed (from HEAD).

In these cases it is better to use cgit or possibly change stagit to run as a CGI program.

Relatively slow to run the first time (about 3 seconds for sbase, 1500+ commits), incremental updates are faster.
Does not support some of the dynamic features cgit has, like:
- Snapshot tarballs per commit.
- File tree per commit.
- History log of branches diverged from HEAD.
- Stats (git shortlog -s).

This is by design, just use git locally.

git clone git://git.codemadness.org/stagit

You can browse the source-code at:

Releases are available at: