Soft Serve is a git server for the command line. You can see the maintainers' version here, with ssh:

1ssh git.charm.sh

It looks like this:

   Soft Serve 

  • Repositories    About

  ┃ Bubble Tea                                                                                                                                                     
  Updated 31 minutes ago
  ┃ A powerful little TUI framework mirror]
  ┃ git clone git@git.charm.sh:bubbletea.git

    Soft Serve                                                                                                                                                         
  Updated 3 days ago                                                                                                  
    A tasty, self-hostable Git server for the command linemirror]                                                   
    git clone git@git.charm.sh:soft-serve.git                                                                         
 

My Server

I've been running one my own Soft Serve instance since 2023. When the server died, I took a backup of the data from /var/lib/soft/, dumped it into the new server, and continued uninterrupted.

Check it out here:

1ssh -p 2222 soft.dmz.rs

Benefits

The setup takes no time, with very few steps - just give it a few variables in /etc/soft, start the service, and start pushing.

Once you've given it your admin ssh keys, you can push repositories without setting them up beforehand. Just enter the repository, and do:

1    git remote add soft ssh -p $PORT_NO $DOMAIN
2    git push soft master

Everything can be performed from the command line, so I managed to mirror a full gitea instance with a little bash script.

The underlying structure lets you see the inner workings very clearly.

Disadvantages

Using git-lfs requires a few more setup steps.

And of course, as this is cli-only, that'll put some people off. That said, this can help the audience self-select.