Radicle: Peer-to-Peer Collaboration with Git (2024)

Summary

March 29, 2024 This article was contributed by Lars Wirzenius Radicle is a new, peer-to-peer, MIT/Apache-licensed collaboration platform written in Rust and built on top of Git. It adds support for issues and pull requests (which Radicle calls "patches") on top of core Git, which are stored in the Git repository itself. Unlike GitHub, GitLab, and similar forges, Radicle is distributed; it doesn't rely on having everyone use the same server. Instead, Radicle instances form a network that synchronizes changes between nodes. As a new project, Radicle is not fully featured compared to the mature and centralized forges. That said, the Radicle developers are using Radicle itself to collaborate on the software, along with a Zulip chat system. The first 1.0.0 release candidate was announced on March 26. (Note that I am paid to help develop Radicle.) Overview In Radicle, each user runs their own node on each computer they use for collaboration. The node stores copies of the repositories the user is interested in, regardless of whether they're created by the user or cloned from another node. The node process runs in the background to fetch changes from peers and serve repositories to peers that want them. To the user, the node acts like a local Git server. You clone from, pull from, or push to the node and it coordinates with other nodes. There is a web interface for browsing repositories, issues, and patches, and it also allows opening and managing issues. The web interface can be opened for the local node, or on a suitably configured server, for any other node. Thus you can inspect any public node to see if it is in sync with yours. The web interface looks a lot like the more mainstream forges, and is meant to feel instantly familiar. You can browse the code, issues, and existing patches. However, unless you run your own Radicle node and open its web interface, you can't currently make changes: you can't report issues, comment on issues, etc. If you want to clone a reposito...