Apache serve files from git repo branches

Question

Is there any way to serve files from branches in a git repo without checking them out into different directories?

I'd love the convenience of being able to create a new branch, push it to a test server repo and then do something like browse to http://branchname.test.com. I can use rewrite rules to handle branch name subdomain to point to different root paths but Apache can't read bare repos of course.

gitfs might work, but seems abandoned.

I don't especially need Apache either.

Answer 1

The simplest approach would be checking out each branch and creating clones for each branch in subdirectories. It's very easy to do that with a script runned by cron (or in a post-commit hook) like:

#!/bin/sh
ROOT=/srv/repos/control
cd ${ROOT} # it's an internal repo
git fetch
for ref in .git/refs/remotes/origin/*; do
  BRANCH=`basename ${ref}`
  if ! [ -d ../${BRANCH} ]; then
    git clone --local ${ROOT} ../${BRANCH}
    cd ../${BRANCH}
    git branch --track ${BRANCH} remotes/origin/${BRANCH}
    git checkout ${BRANCH}
  else
    cd ../${BRANCH}
    git pull
  fi
done

After it's work you will get a bunch of directories with branches in /srv/repos.

git clone --local is very fast and optimal even on huge repositories like Linux kernel because it does not create all the objects in repository but instead creates hardlinks to them, so you won't waste any space on repository copies. You will, through, waste space on checked-out copies, but a) they're probably not very big and b) this will make web-based access much easier and faster.