Cold Chain Git

A version control hosting services built upon Filecoin that uses the versatility of Lighthouse to store your codebases on permanent, fault free and secure chains. We're not here to substitute mainstream git hosting platforms like GitHub. We recognise their importance and instead propose the use of a backup that will never go dark, remain secure and be as versatile as GitHub. We propose no extra CLI tool, just the good old git cli works seamlessly with our service and all cool GUI's will integrate automatically too!

The project is built upon Lighthouse and Filecoins storage system. The codebase is primarily written in Go with complimentary shell scripts to ease automation of sub-services. It features a smart contract to act as a decentralised mapping between repositories and their data (Internally mapped by LightHouse' provided CID's). The contract itself is written in solidity and deployed on the Filecoin network. The go services themselves are smalls snippets of instructions that are run when familiar commands: git push , git clone , and git pull are run. They are responsible for communication with the contract to obtain CID's and to the Lighthouse API (Technically the IPFS). The most challenging segment of our project was to integrate this with the existing git cli. Since the cli itself does not provide proper hooks, we initially tried to set up a local proxy to catch the execution of these commands. However this approach did not satisfy us and was not technically feasible. Instead we came up with a solution that involves a local stateless docker container running SSH and the go services, allowing us to mimic SSH server instead of an HTTP one. This allowed us to track the execution of these commands and run our services without hindering user experience or compromising other GUI tools from working.