Glaze 🍯

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

It serves server-rendered HTML pages that let you browse git repositories, inspect files, and download content. Everything is backend-driven and intentionally simple, primarily serving server side rendered pages.

Goals

Product goals

• Provide a clean, fast web UI for:
  • listing repositories
  • browsing directories and files
  • viewing text files in-browser
  • downloading raw files and archives
• Integrate cleanly with existing soft-serve setups.
• Be pleasant to self-host.

Engineering goals

• Implement a resilient HTTP/1.x server in Odin using raw sockets:
  • incremental request parsing
  • keep-alive support with limits and timeouts
  • bounded memory usage per connection
  • clear connection state machine
• Keep the HTTP server reusable for future projects.

Non-goals (initially)

• Public JSON API
• HTTP/2 or TLS (use a reverse proxy if needed)
• Chunked request bodies
• Full GitHub-like features (PRs, issues, etc.)

High-level architecture

Glaze consists of two main layers:

1. HTTP server

   • TCP listener, raw sockets
   • HTTP/1.x parsing and response writing
   • routing and static file serving

2. Application layer

   • HTML page handlers
   • git / soft-serve integration
   • simple templating helpers

Suggested layout

src/
| http/ # sockets, parsing, routing
| app/ # page handlers
| views/ # HTML helpers / templates
| integrations/
| softserve/ # repo + file access
| static/ # CSS, icons, etc.
| main.odin

Pages & routes (initial scope)

• GET /
  • List repositories
• GET /r/<repo>/
  • Repository overview, file list
• GET /r/<repo>/tree/<ref>/<path>
  • Directory browsing
• GET /r/<repo>/blob/<ref>/<path>
  • View text file
• GET /r/<repo>/raw/<ref>/<path>
  • Download raw file
• GET /r/<repo>/archive/<ref>.(zip|tar.gz)
  • Download repository archive (later)

Git / soft-serve integration

Early versions will likely:

• run on the same host as soft-serve
• access repositories directly via git commands or filesystem access

Integration details are intentionally abstracted so the backend can later switch to:

• soft-serve CLI
• SSH access
• or an internal soft-serve API

HTTP server design notes

• Nonblocking sockets with an event loop (poll/epoll)
• One connection can serve multiple requests (keep-alive)
• Strict limits to avoid resource abuse:
  • max header size
  • max request line length
  • max body size
  • idle timeouts

Milestones

M1: Hello Glaze

• TCP listener + HTTP parsing
• GET / returns simple HTML
• keep-alive working

M2: Layout + static assets

• Basic page layout
• CSS served from /static/

M3: Repository list

• Real repo data
• Clickable repo links

M4: Repository browsing

• Directory listing
• File view
• Raw downloads

M5: Nice touches

• README rendering
• Archive downloads
• Better caching headers

Development

• Local run: glaze -listen 127.0.0.1:8080
• Test with: curl -v http://127.0.0.1:8080/