While it provides an efficient, organized web front-end for your personal git repositories, the cgit application is missing a few of the more sparkling features found at github–notably, a comments/discussion system. Enter: disqus.

Disqus is a Javascript-injected, centralized discussion system that is gaining traction with blogs and other CMS-based sites as of late. One of its chief benefits is the centralization; one account links you to all of the discussions you have participated in within various venues. Another benefit of the system is that it is entirely client-side. What this means for cgit integration is that we won’t need to go mucking about in the cgit source code–we can simply use one of its inherent features, the inclusion of a header HTML file, to tie disqus to it.

First, build an HTML file to fire off a document URL comparison that decides whether or not the current page warrants the injection of the disqus platform (be sure to replace REPLACE-WITH-YOUR-DISQUS-SHORTNAME in the code below):

<script type="text/javascript">
window.onload = function() {
	if((window.location.href.match(/\/tree\/.*[?&]id=/)
		&& document.querySelector('table.blob'))
		|| window.location.href.match(/\/commit\/.*[?&]id=(?!.+&ss=1$)/))
	{
		var d = document.createElement('div');
		d.id = 'disqus_thread';
		document.querySelector('div.content').appendChild(d);
		var disqus_shortname = 'REPLACE-WITH-YOUR-DISQUS-SHORTNAME';
		var dsq = document.createElement('script');
		dsq.type = 'text/javascript';
		dsq.async = true;
		dsq.src = 'http://' + disqus_shortname + '.disqus.com/embed.js';
		document.body.appendChild(dsq);
	}
};
</script>

The code above will only inject the disqus platform on version-specific commit summaries and individual file views. (Without the version specificity, there would be no “hard” context to tie the discussion thread to.) It also prevents the platform from being injected on side-by-side diffs, since this would lead to two different contexts for discussions about the same file version/commit.

To include this newly-fashioned header in your cgit system, add the following line to your cgitrc file (with the appropriate path, of course):

header=/path/to/your.html

That’s it! The next time you visit a version-specific commit or file in your cgit system, the disqus comment thread should be injected at the bottom of the page.

Caveat: Currently, disqus has problems serving its script over HTTPS. If you’re serving cgit over HTTPS (and I am), you will unfortunately be plagued by content security mismatches. They claim that they have already fixed disqus to work over HTTPS, but I have experienced the opposite.