Decentralized Git Hosting Protocol – Radicle Tutorial

Maintaining an open-source ecosystem is more critical than ever in a world where practically all software is based on open-source code.

The dissemination of vital open-source infrastructure is unsustainable if it’s dependent on centrally hosted platforms and corporations. Using such centralized services is incompatible with the values of the free and open-source ecosystem and threatens its survival.

However, a decentralized Git hosting protocol was created as an alternative to eliminate intermediaries and create a stable, effective, and secure peer-to-peer ecosystem.

This post will discuss how to build and push projects to a web3/decentralized Git hosting protocol: Radicle.

Prerequisites

Make sure to have Node/NPM installed on your computer. To install, click here for a guide.

What Is a Git Hosting Protocol?

Git protocol is a unique daemon that comes included with Git and listens on a specific port (9418) to provide a service comparable to SSH, but without any authentication.

It’s the quickest available for file transfers. It employs the same data-transfer technique as SSH, but without encryption and authentication costs.

We’ll likely want to set up a Git Daemon to serve our project if we’re providing a lot of traffic for a public project or hosting a big project that doesn’t require user authentication for reading access.

What Is Radicle?

Radicle is an open, protocol-based, decentralized coding collaboration network. It allows developers to collaborate on code without relying on third parties.

Radicle was created to mimic the capabilities of centralized code collaboration platforms while maintaining Git’s peer-to-peer nature, extending the benefits of distributed version control to eliminate intermediaries, and creating a stable, effective, and secure peer-to-peer ecosystem.

Project Setup and Installation

We’ll install the Radicle CLI to handle identity and interact with Git to push code to the network.

Installation using Cargo on Linux and x86_64 macOS

Install the Radicle CLI by running the following command:

cargo install --force --locked --path . 

Or, directly from our seed node:

cargo install --force --locked --git https: 

Installation Using Homebrew

Install the Radicle CLI by running the following command:

brew tap radicle/cli https: brew install radicle/cli/core 

After installation, use the following command to verify the installation:

rad 

We should have something similar to what we have below:

Create Radicle Identity

To interact with the Radicle network, we need an identity, which we can generate with rad auth.

After choosing a display name and setting a passphrase, the Radicle CLI generates two unique identifiers:

• Peer ID identifies our device and the code you publish on the Radicle network and is secured with an Ed25519 keypair.

• Personal URN, which identifies the user across devices.

Next, we will run the following command:

rad auth 

We should have something similar to what is shown below:

According to the documentation, there’s currently no way to retrieve a lost or forgotten passphrase, so please store it safely!

Building a React Application

It’s time to get our website up and running!

To create a new project, go to a directory of your choice and use the npx create-react-app command.

This command creates a React.js project.

To install the dependencies, copy and paste the commands below:

npx create-react-app <project name cd <project name 

You’ll then receive a message with instructions to connect to your project and execute it locally using the following command:

npm start 

React.js will now start a hot-reloading development environment that’s accessible by default at http://localhost:3000.

This is a simple application; we can push any project to the decentralized Git hosting protocol.

Deploying to a Git Hosting Protocol Using Radicle

We can create a Radicle project from any existing Git repository and publish it on the Radicle network using two CLI commands — rad init and rad push.

Projects…