Gitweb (and, to a lesser extent, git-daemon) are popular tools that provide alternative, read-only access to Git repositories. Git-daemon provides completely unauthenticated access to Git repositories, suitable for open source or similar projects. Gitweb displays repositories, their branches, commit history, and many more details on a web browser. Gitweb itself does not do any authentication, but relies on the web server to authenticate users.

Gitweb and git-daemon have ways to determine which repositories are allowed to be made available to clients. For gitweb, the list of permitted repositories is placed in a specific format (at its simplest, one repository name per line) in a specific file at a configurable location (see the documentation for gitweb for details). On the other hand, git-daemon looks inside each individual repository for a file called git-daemon-export-ok , to determine if the repository should be made accessible to clients. Of course...