Building your own Git remote in under an hour

The idea

git·vodka's idea had been sitting in the back of my mind for a while. Not as some big product idea. I just wanted a tiny git remote I could run for myself, friends, and family. Something a little nicer than throwing bare repos on a server, but without turning it into another giant developer platform.

Today, with everyone suddenly talking about GitHub alternatives again after the recent downtime, I checked git.vodka and saw the domain was available. So I bought it. From there it was mostly impulse.

Building it

I pointed the domain at Cloudflare, opened Codex, and started building. The whole thing runs on Cloudflare:

• Workers for the app
• R2 for git objects and blobs
• D1 for the database

It also contains its own source code, which felt like a fun requirement for something hosting git repos. There wasn't really a plan beyond "let's see if this works." It did.

From buying the domain to having a working version online, the whole thing took less than an hour. Codex wrote most of the boring parts while I kept changing my mind about how I wanted it to work. It's currently running entirely on Cloudflare's free tier, which is kind of ridiculous in the best way.

Anyway, that's git·vodka. You can poke around at git.vodka. And yes, the main advantage of owning your own git hosting service is that nobody can stop you from taking the username c.