Glaze 🍯

Glaze is a small web frontend for soft-serve, built in Odin.

It serves server-rendered HTML pages that let you browse public git repositories, inspect trees and files, view rendered README files, and access raw blobs. Glaze is intentionally simple, self-hosted, and backend-driven.

It is also built on top of a custom HTTP/1.x library written in Odin using raw sockets.

Features

• List public soft-serve repositories
• Filter hidden/private repositories using soft-serve metadata
• Browse repository trees
• Browse refs through URL-based routes
• View files in a simple blob page
• Access raw blob contents
• Render README.md files as HTML
• Show latest commit metadata on repository pages
• Serve static assets
• Provide a warm, minimal HTML interface

Architecture

Glaze is split into a few main layers:

Glaze app
  ├─ routes and page handlers
  ├─ templates and view models
  ├─ soft-serve metadata access
  └─ git repository access

HTTP library
  ├─ raw socket HTTP/1.x server
  ├─ request parsing
  ├─ response building
  ├─ routing
  ├─ middleware
  ├─ static file serving
  └─ connection management

HTTP library

Glaze includes a small reusable HTTP library written in Odin.

Current capabilities include:

• HTTP/1.x request parsing
• keep-alive support
• pipelining/carry-buffer support
• growing ring buffer for connection data
• thread-per-connection handling
• active connection cap
• idle timeout support
• request size limits
• unsupported Transfer-Encoding rejection
• structured response building
• default response headers
• static file serving
• router support:
  • exact routes
  • prefix routes
  • pattern routes
  • route params
  • wildcard path params
• middleware support using explicit handler/user-data chaining

The HTTP layer is intended to remain reusable outside Glaze.

Routing

Glaze uses route patterns for repository browsing.

Examples:

/
 /r/:repo
 /r/:repo/tree/:ref/*path
 /r/:repo/blob/:ref/*path
 /r/:repo/raw/:ref/*path

This allows repository names, refs, and paths to be extracted cleanly from URLs.

Templates

Glaze uses a small custom template system.

Supported syntax:

{{field}}

{{#block}}
  ...
{{/block}}

Blocks can be used for repeated data and conditional rendering. If a block has no data, it is not rendered.

Templates are intentionally simple. Logic stays in Odin, while templates focus on presentation.

soft-serve integration

Glaze reads soft-serve repository metadata from the soft-serve.db SQLite database.

This allows Glaze to respect repository visibility/configuration and only expose public repositories.

The database is expected to be mounted into the Glaze container.

Git integration

Glaze reads repository data directly from bare git repositories using a small libgit2 wrapper.

It currently uses libgit2 to read:

• current commit summary
• author
• commit timestamp
• tree entries
• blob contents

Repositories are mounted into the Glaze container as a Docker volume.

Deployment

Glaze is designed to run alongside soft-serve.

A typical deployment mounts:

• the soft-serve database
• the bare repository directory
• static/web assets, if needed

Glaze does not currently handle TLS directly. Use a reverse proxy such as Caddy, nginx, or similar for HTTPS.

Development

Build and run locally:

./build.sh
./glaze

Test with curl:

curl -v http://127.0.0.1:8080/

Non-goals

Glaze intentionally does not aim to be a full GitHub/Gitea replacement.

Currently out of scope:

• issues
• pull requests
• repository editing
• account management
• public JSON API
• HTTP/2
• built-in TLS termination

Status

Glaze is experimental but functional.

It is already capable of browsing public soft-serve repositories, rendering repository trees, displaying README content, and serving raw files.

License

TBD