Digit — Can You Dig It?

Digit (display git) is a fast, simple web frontend to your git repositories, made to resemble other popular interfaces.

• Browse repos, files, trees, and commits
• Mirror-tree aware: repos nested host/org/repo.git group per org
• File tree view with mode, size, and per-directory readmes
• Blame view with per-commit line groups
• Commit log with full diff output, and message search
• Patch view, append .patch to any commit URL
• Tarball and zip downloads of any branch or tag
• Read-only clone over smart HTTP, with a GitHub-style clone menu
• Atom and RSS commit feeds, per repo and site-wide
• Tag and branch listing
• Syntax highlighting, line anchors with visual range marks
• Keyboard shortcuts for commit and log navigation (press ? for the list)
• GitHub Markdown rendering, with emoji, tables, alerts, and inline images
• Readme quick-links: license, contributing, code of conduct, security
• Templated HTML (fully customizable)
• Dark & Light mode, auto by default with a navbar toggle
• Configurable navbar, per-repo upstream and website links
• Built-in caching: ETag revalidation, immutable hash-pinned URLs

Screenshots

Repo overview	Tree view
Visual line marks	Repo viewer

Configuring

Digit looks for config.yaml in the current directory, falling back to /etc/digit.yaml; use --config <path> to point elsewhere.

repo:
  scanPath: /srv/git
  readme:
    - README.md
    - README
  mainBranch:
    - main
    - master
  ignore:
    - foo
  unlisted:
    - private-repo
dirs:
  templates: ./templates
  static: ./static
meta:
  favicon: favicon.svg
  title: Digit
  description: Explore available Git repositories
  syntaxHighlight: default
features:
  blame: true
  archive: true
  feeds: true
  clone: false
  search: false
nav:
  home: https://example.com
  help: https://github.com/troglobit/digit
  links:
    - name: GitHub
      url: https://github.com/example
server:
  name: git.example.com
  ssh: git@git.example.com
  host: 127.0.0.1
  port: 3000

Mirrored repositories

Repos may live directly in scanPath or nested like a mirror tree, e.g. <host>/<org>/<repo>.git, and both styles can be mixed. Nested repos get URLs matching their path (/github.com/troglobit/mg/), the overview groups them per org, and every level has its own index page (/github.com/, /github.com/troglobit/). With more than 20 repos the front page lists orgs with repo counts instead of every repo.

To hide a whole org, glob it:

repo:
  ignore:
    - github.com/some-vendor/*

Per-repository metadata

The repo overview and summary pages show the classic gitweb description file, so set it in each repo:

$ echo "Fast init for Linux systems.  Cookies included." > /srv/git/finit.git/description

To link a repo to its upstream, e.g. the GitHub project it mirrors, or to its website, set the digit.upstream and digit.website keys in the repo's git config. They show up as upstream ↗ and website ↗ in the repo navigation:

$ git -C /srv/git/finit.git config digit.upstream https://github.com/troglobit/finit
$ git -C /srv/git/finit.git config digit.website https://troglobit.com/projects/finit/

Building

After cloning this repo, build a stand-alone binary with:

$ cd digit/
$ make

The Makefile is a thin wrapper around the Go toolchain (go build); make check vets and tests, make fmt formats. No external dependencies beyond the Go toolchain.

At runtime digit requires git to be installed on the server — all repository access shells out to git plumbing commands. This is the same requirement as Gogs, and what keeps CPU usage low: the git binary uses commit-graph and pack index optimizations that pure-Go git libraries lack.

Installation

make install installs the binary, a sample /etc/digit.yaml (an existing one is left untouched), and the bundled systemd service, which runs digit as a restricted git user. prefix, sysconfdir, unitdir, and DESTDIR are honored, for packaging:

$ sudo make install
$ sudo useradd --system --home /srv/git --shell /usr/sbin/nologin git

Point repo.scanPath in /etc/digit.yaml at your repos — they must be readable by the git user, but need not be owned by it: digit marks everything under scanPath as safe.directory for its own git commands, so mirrors synced by another user work out of the box, without tripping git's dubious-ownership check. Then:

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl enable --now digit

Cloning

With features.clone enabled, every repo can be cloned read-only over smart HTTP — handy for an office-internal digit:

$ git clone https://git.example.com/finit

Digit proxies the two upload-pack endpoints to git http-backend; push is never routed, so repos cannot be written to. Set server.name and repo pages get a clone menu next to the branch selector, with copyable URLs and a tarball download, plus go-import meta tags so Go vanity imports work.

If the server also runs sshd with git access, set server.ssh to the user@host prefix and the menu offers SSH clone URLs too, built from each repo's real on-disk path.

Logging and crawlers

Under systemd digit detects the journal and drops its own timestamps. Under other init systems, e.g. Finit, start digit with -s/--syslog to log via syslog(3) instead of stderr. Rejected requests are logged with the client address:

client 192.0.2.7: GET /finit/nope: 404

which fail2ban can match to ban scanners and scrapers:

# /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/digit.conf
[Definition]
failregex = ^.*client <HOST>: .*: (404|500)
journalmatch = _SYSTEMD_UNIT=digit.service

Digit also serves a /robots.txt keeping well-behaved crawlers off the expensive endpoints (archive, blame, raw); override it by placing your own in dirs.static.

Running behind a reverse proxy

Digit listens on 127.0.0.1:3000 by default, made to sit behind a TLS-terminating reverse proxy. All generated links are root-relative — the listen address never leaks into any page — so no rewriting is needed. The one requirement is that digit is served at the root of its host: use a dedicated (sub)domain like git.example.com; mounting under a sub-path such as example.com/git/ is not supported.

With nginx:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name git.example.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    }
}

With merecat httpd, using virtual hosts:

virtual-host = true

server https {
    port     = 443
    certfile = /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem
    keyfile  = /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem

    proxy-pass "/**" {
        host    = "git.example.com"
        backend = "http://127.0.0.1:3000"
    }
}

Copyright (c) 2026  Joachim Wiberg <troglobit@gmail.com>

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