Goblet: Git caching proxy

Goblet is a Git proxy server that caches repositories for read access. Git clients can configure their repositories to use this as an HTTP proxy server, and this proxy server serves git-fetch requests if it can be served from the local cache.

In the Git protocol, the server creates a pack-file dynamically based on the objects that the clients have. Because of this, caching Git protocol response is hard as different client needs a different response. Goblet parses the content of the HTTP POST requests and tells if the request can be served from the local cache.

This was developed by Google to reduce the automation traffic to googlesource.com. Goblet would be useful if you need to run a Git read-only mirroring server to offload the traffic.

We took the initial implementation from github.com/google/goblet at commit 140dd10abcdde487161f1e3c2c6e9b4868f7326c and added the following modifications:

• Removed all code specific to googlesource.com.
• Removed all the GCP-related code and dependencies.
• Added support for caching GitHub repositories, and automatically fetch every 15 minutes.
• Added support for GitHub Apps as authentication mechanism.
• Added DataDog for exporting metrics.
• Remove Bazel. Use pure Go tooling to build and release.

Usage

1. Build Goblet

   bazel build //goblet-server

2. Start the Goblet server

   export GH_APP_ID="<APP_ID>"
   export GH_APP_INSTALLATION_ID="<APP_INSTALLATION_ID>"
   export GH_APP_PRIVATE_KEY="<APP_PRIVATE_KEY_PEM_TEXT>"
   bazel-bin/goblet-server/goblet-server_/goblet-server -config "<PATH_TO_CONFIG_FILE>"

   See example_config.json for how the minimum config file should look like.

3. Configure your Git client to use Goblet as a read-only proxy:

   git config http.proxy "http://localhost:8080"
   git remote set-url origin "http://github.com/<owner>/<repo-name>.git"
   git remote set-url --push origin "[email protected]:<owner>/<repo-name>.git"

4. Try a git fetch command and watch Goblet's outputs to see if it's working as expected.

   git fetch origin master

Limitations

Note that Goblet forwards the ls-refs traffic to the upstream server. If the upstream server is down, Goblet is effectively down. Technically, we can modify Goblet to serve even if the upstream is down, but the current implementation doesn't do such thing.