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.

Values are HTML escaped. {{&field}} writes a value as is, and is only for content that is trusted to be HTML, such as rendered Markdown.

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