Git Bug: Distributed, Offline-First Bug Tracker Embedded in Git, with Bridges
34 comments
·May 13, 2025layer8
sudoforge
maintainer here - this is great feedback!
i recently rewrote the README because i felt like its previous iteration was a bit _too_ dense. i may have gone a bit overboard on moving things :)
FWIW, the screenshots you're looking for currently live in: https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/blob/bd936650ccf44ca33cf9...
bognition
honestly cleaning up the Readme and documentation would go a very long way, right now all the information feels fragmented behind all of the little pages. I clicked into the documentation and clicked the first link presented to me on each page and 5 clicks or so in I was on the command line docs but I hadn't seen anything that gave me a high level overview of what git-bug is, what it does, why I want to use it, etc...
I understand that documentation can be hard and you need docs for newbies and long time users, but as a newbie I cannot for the life of me figure out what this is.
hungryhobbit
While I like the idea of tool consolidation, bug trackers aren't just a tool for the engineers. At most companies I've worked at, the support team, designers, QA team, managers, etc. all use the bug tracker on a daily basis.
It sounds like you can "bridge" to somehow show the tracker outside Engineering, but then you're having to do work around the consolidation, and I'd imagine the result won't be as nice as a full-featured tracker designed for everyone to use.
But, I am curious to hear from someone who has actually used this thing.
chungy
Fossil[0] has bug tracking as a standard feature, and through the HTTP role-based authentication, you are able to set up users with different privileges; for instance, being able to read and write the bug tracker without the ability to push new code.
ndegruchy
+1 for this. I love having a self-contained, syncable GitHub-lite. It uses SQLite for the format, too, which makes it easy to discover the internals.
It just needs some more 'modern' themes
sudoforge
hey! maintainer here.
git-bug has a web ui that you can run on your git server, for example, that can be accessed through a browser.
it's fairly limited in functionality right now (create, comment on, and manage issues), but one of my goals is to refactor it to improve coverage of the existing features, and to add support for things like:
- authenticated access
- unauthenticated/anonymous access (e.g. a public, external contributor/user)
- issue privacy levels
- sprints, projects, report generation
layer8
Improved user interfaces can always be added on top of the CLI/library functionality, and that’s the more flexible approach. Everyone can use and/or build their favorite UI, like people do with Git itself.
The monolithic web-first (often web-only) systems are a bit of a modern bane, you’re stuck with whatever user interface the one company/maintainer deems appropriate.
bluGill
All those users are why bug trackers are annoying. I don't care about those fields "those other people" are demanding, why do I need to fill them out. Mean while they don't care about the fields that are critical for me and don't want to fill them out.
baq
Every job has a part people don't like that's necessary. The company you work for pays you money to fill the fields out, you fill them out, you get paid.
devrandoom
This is a bug tracker. What you are describing is much closer to a project management tool, just to make the difference clear.
dcrazy
Those should be tightly integrated, if not the same tool.
nine_k
It depends on who manages the project. In an open-source project, those will likely also be engineering types, not non-technical managers.
It's hard to make a product that's all things to all people, and it's wise to make a product that has a well-understood, if more narrow, audience.
whateveracct
To some people, engineers without project management doesn't make any sense.
hosh
I think that is more useful for communities whose members don't have reliable, always-on networks, rather than workflows within companies.
hungryhobbit
P.S. The GitHub readme for this project desperately needs a "Why?" (... would anyone use it, ie. what benefits does it offer vs. say Jira?)
jFriedensreich
I think this is made for an audience who find it obvious. "Why would you do it any other way" would be more interesting: There is a weird divide between git supported features on one hand and pull requests/ merge requests/ patch lists/ issues/ bug trackers etc. If everything was supported in git all these features would be interoperable between forges like github, bitbucket and gitea, forgejo.
Not only interoperability but backups, tooling, distributed workflows and everything in between would work consistently and the same way.
That said, I cannot count the times this concept was brought up and tried to make work but despite how much i love the idea in theory, i have yet to see a way it could work in practice.
Some of the issues: - no universal agreement on exact schema, feature set and workflows, do the competing implementations break each other? if its not interoperable why even bother vs just using an external solution
- how to handle issues not associated to one specific repo or to multiple repos, splitting repos etc.
- how to not confuse devs seeing issue branches or wherever the actual data is stored in the repo
- how to best make this usable to non devs
The list goes on
cryptonector
> "Why would you do it any other way" would be more interesting:
That's the interesting question. Normally a bug tracker would basically be a SQL application. When you move it into a Git repo you lose that and now you have to think about how to represent all that relational data in your repository. It gets annoying. This is why for Fossil it's such a trivial thing to do: Fossil repositories _are_ relational and hosted on an RDBMS (SQLite3 or PG). If you don't have a SQL then referential integrity is easy to break (e.g., issues that refer to others that don't know they're being referred to), and querying your issue database becomes a problem as it gets huge because Git doesn't really have an appropriate index for this.
What one might do to alleviate the relational issues is to just not try to maintain referential integrity but instead suck up the issues from Git into a local SQLite3 DB. Then as long as there are no non-fast-forward pushes to the issues DB it's always easy to catch up and have a functional relational database.
cryptonector
It's obvious. It's also not original. There are multiple things like this already. Fossil was the first tool to put bug tracking in the repository. Idk which VCS/forge was the first to put wikis in the repository, but it might have been GitHub or Fossil.
The point here is to be able to work with issues, PRs, and wikis offline just as one is now used to doing with code. And to use the same underlying content-addressed version control tooling for all those things.
binary132
It’s very weird seeing the coping / seething about a useful tool like this even in HN comments. People have really drunk the proverbial kool-aid / joined the dark side.
haukilup
> It’s very weird seeing the coping / seething about a useful tool like this even in HN comments. People have really drunk the proverbial kool-aid / joined the dark side.
It’s unclear to me what you mean.
dannymi
There's also https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue which has much fewer dependencies.
WD-42
This is incredibly cool. I love seeing local first software starting to make a comeback. Github is becoming painful to use, even on a fast connection.
binary132
The fact that nearly all of our source code is not only hosted on proprietary platforms that can (and do) delete it any time they like, but is ALSO integrated with many of our build systems so that it’s not trivially relocatable blows my mind every time I think about it.
IshKebab
This really seems like an odd thing to make distributed. Do I now have to resolve conflicts in bug conversations? Am I going to find replies magically appearing before mine? The README doesn't even acknowledge that these difficulties might exist.
This sounds like it adds a ton of potential problems and solves some very minor ones:
* You can work offline. Great, but 90% of bug tracking is sending messages to other people so that's not particularly useful.
* You aren't tied to GitHub Issues or whatever. I guess that's good. Seems pretty marginal though.
riedel
I think there is multiple cases where repos are mirrored between Codeberg, GitHub and internal and public instances of Gitlab. People want to open issues where they are and they can get accounts. Also I had to migrate issues from one repo to the other. Having wikis moved to git repos is a big advantage over trac and redmine (we just recently moved old projects and it is a pain each time). So I highly welcome anyone who moves issue tracking to git as well.
sudoforge
hey, maintainer here!
> Do I now have to resolve conflicts in bug conversations? > Am I going to find replies magically appearing before mine?
actually, no! git-bug objects embed a lamport timestamp [0] to handle time-based ordering, and actions like comment posting and editing are tracked as "operations", applied in order, and you will never have to deal with a merge conflict.
the data model documentation [1] provides deeper insight into how we handle time, describe why you'll never see a merge conflict, and more. through this post, i've gathered that many people would prefer this sort of documentation be made more visible in the README (instead of "buried" under //doc). the README is probably a bit too high level for a more technical audience, but i appreciate your feedback here, and will take it into consideration as the README is refactored.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_timestamp [1]: https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/blob/bd936650ccf44ca33cf9...
rzwitserloot
I've been yelling 'omg why doesnt someone build a ticketing system on the basis of git, having a separate 'root' (no-parent git commit that is at the bottom of a git tree; technically a git repo can have more than one), with most of the conversation happening in git commit form' - for YEARS.
This is wildly exciting.
sudoforge
you aren't alone! linus thinks we need this, too:
wahern
FWIW, this project made its first release in 2018. =) It's been posted to HN several times, though under its previous project URL, https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug (see https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/michaelmur...)
tiffanyh
Interesting that GPL3 was selected for this, while Git itself is GPL2 (these are incompatible licenses)
chungy
It'd only really matter if git-bug were to become part of the core Git features. Perhaps one or the other could relicense if that became a desirable outcome.
I have doubt it'll happen. GitHub/GitLab culture is pretty strong, few seem interested in having distributed project management features.
stratosgear
Docs seem to miss instructions on how you add a bug! Did I miss it?
pacifika
Might be interesting as a personal cross project todo tracker?
Some screenshots would be nice. I found this one [0] of the TUI from 2018, but not much else.
[0] https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/releases/tag/0.4.0