cgithub is a lightweight GitHub alternative frontend. It has no bloated JavaScript and doesn't require API keys. It runs on Cloudflare Workers; to use it, deploy your own instance then replace github.com in your URL with your domain.

Development

To run the server locally:

$ pnpm run dev

To run tests:

$ pnpm test

Deployment

To deploy to Cloudflare Workers:

$ pnpm run deploy

The worker name and other settings live in wrangler.jsonc.

Browser extension redirects

Pages cgithub can't render (marketing pages, code search, anything unrouted) are redirected back to github.com. A browser extension that rewrites github.com URLs to a cgithub instance with declarativeNetRequest will match those redirects too and send the request straight back, looping forever.

To avoid this, cgithub never answers with an HTTP redirect: it serves a small page that navigates to github.com with a two-second <meta http-equiv="refresh">. Because that navigation is initiated by the cgithub origin, the extension can let it through with excludedInitiatorDomains; without that, the user at least lands on a page they can stop on, with a link, instead of an endless loop.

A rule that redirects to a cgithub instance should therefore look like this:

{
  "action": {
    "type": "redirect",
    "redirect": { "transform": { "host": "cgithub.example" } },
  },
  "condition": {
    "urlFilter": "||github.com",
    "resourceTypes": ["main_frame"],
    // So cgithub's own meta refresh to github.com isn't redirected back here.
    "excludedInitiatorDomains": ["cgithub.example"],
  },
}

Disclosures

AI coding assistants, in particular Claude, are used in the development process.

Phospor Icons used under MIT license.