git http-backend show info when accessing per browser

Question

I'm currently hosting my own git-repos for my private projects. For this, I use Apache and the standard git http-backend.

Now, a repo can be accessed under an URL like this:

http://vcs.myserver.lc/git/Repo.git 

With this URL, I can push, fetch and clone to/from this repo using git. However, opening this URL in a Browser simply gives me a blank page and now I'm looking for a way to avoid this.

Instead, I'd like Apache to present a page with some infos like:

This is not a web-page, this is a git-repo. You can clone this repo using git clone [URL] ...

It would be nice if [URL] would be replaced with the current URL (using PHP for example), but plain HTML would be fine, too.

I know this should be possible since github does the same with their repos.

I managed to do something similar for the vcs.myserver.lc-domain by specifying a DocumentRoot in the VHost-config file:

DocumentRoot /srv/http/vcs/ 

In this path, i put a simple index.html-file with basic instructions.

So, is their any simple way of showing an info side for browsers while the git-client can still work with the repo? Can I redirect browsers to a specific info-site?

Answer 1

Yes, that's actually relatively simple. You need to tell apache to only use the git-http-backend for things git is interested in, which is anything that matches ^.*/(HEAD|info/refs|objects/info/.*|git-(upload|receive)-pack)$