<title>Fossil Self-Hosting Repositories</title>
Fossil has self-hosted since 2007-07-21. As of 2017-07-25
there are three publicly accessible repositories for the Fossil source code:
1. [https://www.fossil-scm.org/]
2. [https://www2.fossil-scm.org/]
3. [https://www3.fossil-scm.org/site.cgi]
The canonical repository is (1). Repositories (2) and (3) automatically
stay in synchronization with (1) via a
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron">cron job</a> that invokes
"fossil sync" at regular intervals.
Note that the two secondary repositories are more than just read-only mirrors.
All three servers support full read/write capabilities.
Changes (such as new tickets or wiki or check-ins) can be implemented
on any of the three servers and those changes automatically propagate to the
other two servers.
Server (1) runs as a CGI script on a
<a href="http://www.linode.com/">Linode 8192</a> located in Dallas, TX
- on the same virtual machine that
hosts <a href="http://www.sqlite.org/">SQLite</a> and over a
dozen other smaller projects. This demonstrates that Fossil can run on
a low-power host processor.
Multiple fossil-based projects can easily be hosted on the same machine,
even if that machine is itself one of several dozen virtual machines on
single physical box. The CGI script that runs the canonical Fossil
self-hosting repository is as follows:
<blockquote><pre>
#!/usr/bin/fossil
repository: /fossil/fossil.fossil
</pre></blockquote>
Server (3) ran for 10 years as a CGI script on a shared hosting account at
<a href="http://www.he.net/">Hurricane Electric</a> in Fremont, CA.
This server demonstrated the ability of
Fossil to run on an economical shared-host web account with no
privileges beyond port 80 HTTP access and CGI. It is not necessary
to have a dedicated computer with administrator privileges to run Fossil.
As far as we are aware,
Fossil is the only full-featured configuration management system
that can run in
such a restricted environment. The CGI script that ran on the
Hurricane Electric server was the same as the CGI script shown above,
except that the pathnames are modified to suit the environment:
<blockquote><pre>
#!/home/hwaci/bin/fossil
repository: /home/hwaci/fossil/fossil.fossil
</pre></blockquote>
In recent years, virtual private servers have become a more flexible and
less expensive hosting option compared to shared hosting accounts.
So on 2017-07-25, server (3) was moved
onto a $5/month "droplet" VPS from [https://www.digitalocean.com|Digital Ocean]
located in San Francisco.
Server (3) is synchronized with the canonical server (1) by running
the following command via cron:
<blockquote><pre>
/home/hwaci/bin/fossil sync -R /home/hwaci/fossil/fossil.fossil
</pre></blockquote>
Server (2) is a
<a href="http://www.linode.com/">Linode 4096</a> located in Newark, NJ
and set up just like the canonical server (1) with the addition of a
cron job for synchronization as in server (3).