gawsh: a static site generator to peruse git repositories

Gawsh darn, that's a lot of HTML...

gawsh is a highly opinionated tool to generate simple, static page fragments used to browse a Git repository. It's meant to compliment, but not integrate directly with, existing static site generators, allowing a low-friction visual transition from, perhaps, a blog to ones' code. By extension, it seamlessly supports being embedded within a blog or blog post, because it just generates static page fragments.

This tool isn't the first player in this space, though it wasn't far off, somehow. The most feature-complete alternative I've come across is stagit, which is also excellent and worth your consideration.

This tool makes no attempt to be a social network, to understand the concepts of "users" or "accounts", to manage or otherwise do anything to a repository that might require write access, or to deploy anything to anywhere. It also does not, and will not, introduce analytics, telemetry, or other forms of tracking to its output. If you're looking for any of the above, consider another service. Here's a few that are libre software, though not all of these do all (or even most) of the above:

• Gitea, or perhaps a hosted version thereof, for example Codeberg
• Gogs
• Sourcehut
• cgit
• GitLab

Getting Started

This section reserved, to be filled in eventually...

gawsh has very little configuration of its own, and does not have a config file. Its few options are all passed on the command line:

• help text goes here

Where can I use it?

gawsh should generally run anywhere a Rust 1.51+ compiler can target against any Git repository libgit2 can understand, and its output is plain UTF-8 text you can upload to just about anywhere you want. Yep, even that FTP host you last used in 1999. It doesn't integrate with any CI systems or, for example, GitHub Pages, out of the box - that's left as an exercise to the reader, or to some other program, probably by some other author.

On the viewing end, the output files should be legible, even if not perfect, in anything capable of rendering basic, standards-compliant HTML5 fragments. In general, this means gawsh sites should work to some basic degree (or better) in browsers like Lynx or Netsurf.

Copying, Contributing, and Legal

gawsh's implementation, specification, documentation, artwork, and other assets are all Copyfree, released under the Creative Commons Zero 1.0 dedication. This means you're free to use it for any purpose, in any context, and without letting me know.

Contributions will be considered, but are not guaranteed to be merged for any reason or no reason at all. By submitting a contribution to gawsh, you assert the following (this is the Unlicense waiver):

I dedicate any and all copyright interest in this software to the public domain. I make this dedication for the benefit of the public at large and to the detriment of my heirs and successors. I intend this dedication to be an overt act of relinquishment in perpetuity of all present and future rights to this software under copyright law.

To the best of my knowledge and belief, my contributions are either originally authored by me or are derived from prior works which I have verified are also in the public domain and are not subject to claims of copyright by other parties.

To the best of my knowledge and belief, no individual, business, organization, government, or other entity has any copyright interest in my contributions, and I affirm that I will not make contributions that are otherwise encumbered.