Fossil

Fossil is a simple, high-reliability, distributed SCM system with a built-in web interface, including a wiki, a ticket system, a forum and more.

Note

For this guide you should be familiar with the basic concepts of

Prerequisites

Your Fossil web URL needs to be setup:

[isabell@stardust ~]$ uberspace web domain list
isabell.uber.space
[isabell@stardust ~]$

Installation

Fossil is distributed as a single binary, which in this case is the server and the client component. Download Fossil’s latest release and extract it.

[isabell@stardust ~]$ mkdir ~/fossil
[isabell@stardust ~]$ wget https://fossil-scm.org/home/uv/fossil-linux-x64-2.24.tar.gz
[...]
[isabell@stardust ~]$ tar -xzf fossil-linux-x64-2.24.tar.gz -C ~/fossil/
[isabell@stardust ~]$ rm fossil-linux-x64-2.24.tar.gz
[isabell@stardust ~]$

Configuration

Create a repository root

Each Fossil repository is a self-contained SQLite database. The Fossil server needs to know where your repositories are. In this example, we use ~/repos:

[isabell@stardust ~]$ mkdir ~/repos
[isabell@stardust ~]$

Configure web server

To make the application accessible from the outside, configure a web backend:

[isabell@stardust ~]$ uberspace web backend set / --http --port <port>
Set backend for / to port <port>; please make sure something is listening!
You can always check the status of your backend using "uberspace web backend list".
[isabell@stardust ~]$

Note

Fossil will be running on port 8008. You can choose any other valid port in the next step.

Setup daemon

To start the Fossil server automatically and run it in the background, create ~/etc/services.d/fossil.ini with the following content:

[program:fossil]
command=%(ENV_HOME)s/fossil/fossil server %(ENV_HOME)s/repos --repolist --port 0.0.0.0:8008 --remove-prefix

After creating the configuration, tell supervisord to refresh its configuration and start the service:

[isabell@stardust ~]$ supervisorctl reread
SERVICE: available
[isabell@stardust ~]$ supervisorctl update
SERVICE: added process group
[isabell@stardust ~]$ supervisorctl status
SERVICE                            RUNNING   pid 26020, uptime 0:03:14
[isabell@stardust ~]$

Setup a test repository (optional)

To see if everything is working, you can create a test repository here:

[isabell@stardust ~]$ cd ~/repos
[isabell@stardust ~]$ ../fossil/fossil init test.fossil
[isabell@stardust ~]$

Finishing installation

Point your browser to the URL you set up, e. g. https://isabell.uber.space. If you created the test repository in the previous step, you should already see it.

Updates

Note

Fossil must be updated manually.

Tested with Fossil 2.24 on Uberspace 7.16.0

Written by: tux0r <https://tuxproject.de>