There are many reasons to run a web service in a container. One of the remote services I rely on most heavily is git. While git local operations are fine in a global namespace, running a shared git repository on a remote server is a web-service based use case. There are three protocols used most commonly to remotely access git: git, ssh, and https. I am going to focus on the last one here.

In a previous post I ran git and gitweb as Web services directly on my laptop. Then I got push access to work. Now I want to do the same thing, but in a container. The directory that stores the repository files are going to be mounted into the container so that they survive a reboot.

We are going to use the same git.conf and gitweb.conf files as we used for the base OS, but we will put them into the container image via a Dockerfile.

FROM fedora:latest
#registry.fedoraproject.org/f29/httpd
USER root
LABEL maintainer="Adam Young"
# Update image
RUN yum -y install httpd
RUN yum -y install gitweb
COPY git.conf /etc/httpd/conf.d/
RUN mkdir -p /var/www/git
 
EXPOSE 80
# Start the service
CMD ["-D", "FOREGROUND"]
ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/sbin/httpd"]

To build the container, I used podman:

buildah bud -t ayoung/gitserver

And to run it:

podman run  -p 9999:80/tcp  --mount type=bind,source=/var/lib/git,destination=/var/lib/git --rm -it localhost/ayoung/gitserver

Note that I run from a very non-standard port: 9999. To clone from this server:

git clone http://gitserver:9999/repo/gitserver.repo

Note that I have put an entry into /etc/hosts for gitserver.

Make a change and trying to push back to the server gives me an error:

git clone http://gitserver:99$ git push
Enumerating objects: 5, done.
Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 347 bytes | 347.00 KiB/s, done.
Total 3 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
error: remote unpack failed: unable to create temporary object directory
To http://gitserver:9999/repo/gitserver.repo
 ! [remote rejected] master -> master (unpacker error)
error: failed to push some refs to 'http://gitserver:9999/repo/gitserver.repo'

Even when running with SELinux in permissive mode. This is because the user that is writing the file has a different ID than

the ayoung user that owns the repo. If I make the repo world writable:

I can successfully push to the remote repository.

Both this change and the config change in the last post are not how I would want to run in product, but these are interim steps toward what I really want: running the git server in OpenShift. We’ll get there.