Vervis

Vervis is a project hosting and management application, with a focus on software projects and decentralization. There is still a lot to do, but if you'd like to try it, a few things more or less work. See below for details.

Vervis is free software, and is committed to software freedom. Most of its code is in the public domain using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. The application as a whole however is released under AGPL version 3. For the legal details, see the file COPYING. Please use and reuse Vervis for a Good purpose, and share your work too in the same spirit.

Try It

You can either use the existing instance mentioned below, or install your own instance (see INSTALL.md).

My focus has been on writing the backend side of features and exploring various experimental features. As a result, the user interface and visual design and page styles (i.e. the whole UX and UI) are in a bad shape right now, so I want to write a few little guidelines to help you find your way until this situation improves.

There is a Vervis instance running at https://vervis.peers.community, and I store my code on it. Feel free to use it and try it, however do please treat it as a demo, as it's not a reliable stable instance for general use yet. If for any reason you do with to keep some code and tickets etc. on it for actual use, please contact me to let me know.

Here are the steps to make the most out of it at this point (at least at the time of writing, I'll try to keep this little tutorial up to date)!

1. Create an SSH key if you don't have one. Most likely you do, for pushing to your existing repos hosted on your favorite project hosting platform.

2. Browse to the instance I linked above, and click Sign up. Choose a username and a password. Email address is currently optional on this instance, but it's going to be required soon and used for things like password reset, so please do provide a real email address.

3. Log in. Once you log in, the front page will change, and among other things, it will link to your SSH keys. Go there to add your SSH key. In the algorithm box you paste the first part e.g. ssh-rsa, and in the second box you paste the long scary part that follows it.

4. The front page also links you to repos and projects, you can create a project and open tickets. You can also create a Git or Darcs repo, and optionally associate it with a project. A project can have any number of repos asociated with it, sharing the same ticket tracker. Creating a project or repo may ask you to create a project or repo role; the front page has links for creating these

5. You can browse all the projects and repos hosted on the instance.

6. Add the following to your ~/.ssh/config file, or create it if doesn't exist. To be honest I'm not sure it's still required, and haven't tested yet. If you find that this step is unnecessary and everything works without it, let me know :)

    Host vervis.peers.community
        KexAlgorithms +diffie-hellman-group1-sha1
        ControlMaster no
        ForwardAgent no
        ForwardX11 no
        Ciphers +aes256-cbc
        MACs +hmac-sha1
        PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes +ssh-rsa
        HostKeyAlgorithms +ssh-rsa
   

Once you create a repository, it is possible that initially, trying to look at it will give you 404. It should be okay though once you push some commit into it.

The examples below use Git, but it's exactly the same for Darcs. They are equally supported.

Cloning repositories works over (unauthenticated) HTTPS and (authenticated) SSH.

HTTPS clone:

$ git clone https://vervis.peers.community/repos/rjQ3E vervis

SSH clone and push:

If your system username and Vervis username are identical:

$ git clone vervis.peers.community:rjQ3E vervis

If usernames are different:

$ git clone luke@vervis.peers.community:rjQ3E vervis

A few more little notes:

• No password reset, it's already implemented but not deployed yet at the time of writing these words
• A few more features are available, such as ticket workflows and ticket claim requests, but they are less important so I'm not going into them at this point
• Deletion of users, projects and repos may not work
• Login session should last for 2 hours after last access
• The instance I'm running serves only HTTPS, no plain HTTP
• There's no HTTPS push
• Merge requests not implemented yet
• I started working on federation using ActivityPub, I'll update here when it's ready for trying against ActivityPub clients and servers
• Feedback is very very very very very welcome and needed!!! :)

Features

This is a list of initial features I plan to support in Vervis. It helps me get an overview of more-or-less what's left to do before the first release. It hasn't been updated in a long time, actually, but soon I'll get to it.

[ ] - To do
[~] - Work in progress
[/] - Initial coding done, needs tests and polishing
[x] - Complete

[ ] User management
  [~] View your personal overview
  [~] Other users' pages
  [/] Register
  [ ] Delete account
  [/] Log in
  [/] Log out
  [ ] Reset password
  [ ] TLS client cert
    [ ] Upload it
    [ ] View it
    [ ] Log in using it
  [ ] Change profile details
  [/] Key management
    [/] Add key
    [/] Delete key
    [/] View keys
[ ] Project management
  [/] Tickets
  [ ] Wiki
  [ ] Kanban
  [ ] Merge requests
[ ] Repo management
  [ ] Delete repo
  [/] Add repo
  [ ] Rename repo
  [ ] Edit repo settings
  [ ] View repo content
    [/] File tree
    [ ] File content
      [/] Plain text
      [/] Syntax highlighting
      [/] Document rendering
      [ ] Images
      [ ] Audio
      [ ] Video
      [ ] Raw file download
[ ] Darcs
  [ ] Create new repo
    [/] Web
    [ ] SSH
  [ ] Delete repo
    [/] Web
    [ ] SSH
  [/] Clone
    [/] HTTP
    [/] SSH
  [/] Pull
    [/] HTTP
    [/] SSH
  [ ] Push
    [ ] HTTP
    [/] SSH
  [/] View
    [/] History
    [/] Files
[ ] Git
  [ ] Create new repo
    [/] Web
    [ ] SSH
  [ ] Delete repo
    [/] Web
    [ ] SSH
  [ ] Clone
    [/] HTTP
    [/] SSH
    [ ] Git
  [ ] Pull
    [/] HTTP
    [/] SSH
    [ ] Git
  [ ] Push
    [ ] HTTP
    [/] SSH
  [/] View
    [/] History
    [/] Files
[~] Federation

Reliability requirements

These features are considered critical for a Vervis instance to be a reasonably reliable place where people can host their projects and repos, and not worry about some bug or missing feature causing loss of data or access.

[ ] Password reset, at least over plain email, either automatically or a
    temporary manual hack which will work at least for personal instances
[x] Git pull and push over SSH fully working
[x] Darcs pull and push over SSH fully working
[x] SSH server implementation really secure as far as I know
[x] TLS support, especially critical when sending passwords. For now, done
    externally through Lighttpd, not Vervis itself
[x] Darcs pull over HTTP and HTTPS
[x] Git pull over HTTP and HTTPS
[ ] Clear policy and guidelines for DB schema changes
[ ] Running instance has data backups

Federation & API

See FEDERATION.md & API.md.

Installation

See INSTALL.md.

Using

See the .cabal file for more info and link to project website and version control.

The official download location is the Darcs repository:

https://vervis.peers.community/repos/rjQ3E

There is a backup repo, not always up to date though, at:

https://codeberg.org/forgefed/vervis

See the file INSTALL.md for a detailed usage and deployment guide. The file ChangeLog explains how to see the history log of the changes done in the code. NEWS.md provides a friendly overview of the changes for each release.

Finding your way in the codebase

Folders:

• app: main functions of the web app, for regular build and for development modes
• config: Settings the app reads when it launches, some defined by a human and some auto-generated
• .git: Internal version control data of this repo
• embed: Files embedded into the app source code at build time (using TH)
• hook-darcs & hook-git: main functions for VCS hook programs to be inserted into every repo hosted by the app
• migrations: Helper files for DB migrations: New entities added & model files for migrations involving data manipulation
• src: Web app Haskell source code, built as a library whose modules are used by the various executables
• static: Static files (such as CSS and fonts) served by the web app (no such files at the moment)
• templates: UI page and widget templates (.hamlet for HTML, .cassius for CSS)
• test: No tests have been written yet
• th: Domain-specific language snippets, from which code is generated using TH

Files:

• .gitignore
• th/routes
• th/models
• update-deps.sh
• bindist.sh

Haskell modules in src:

• Non-Vervis modules:
  • Modules ending with Local:
  • The rest:
• Vervis.Data
• Vervis.Persist
• Vervis.Fetch
• Vervis.Serve
• Vervis.Query
• Vervis.Web
• Primary web app support modules:
  • Vervis.Foundation
  • Vervis.Application
  • Vervis.Settings
  • Vervis.Model
  • Vervis.Migration
• Primary web app logic modules:
  • Vervis.Actor
  • Vervis.Handler
  • Vervis.Client
• Vervis.Ssh

Reporting Bugs and Suggesting Features

If you found a bug, or you have an idea, a feature request or a wishlist item, open a ticket for it! Even if you're going to implement something or try to solve it.

If you're going to implement some feature or fix some bug you found, start by opening a ticket here so that other people will know which features are being developed and who does what.

UPDATE: The ticket tracker is temporarily unavailable. You can instead contact Pere to report issues and to coordinate work.

Funding

This project is funded through the NGI Zero Entrust Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet program. Learn more at the NLnet project page.