Shopify's CEO ships a Rust git server backed by S3

Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke published walgit as a single commit on August 23, and it passed 720 stars within a day. It's a single-binary git server written in Rust that stores the whole repository in S3 instead of on local disk.

That matters for anyone who's ruled out self-hosting git because of the operational weight of keeping a server's disk in sync with a repository. Walgit removes local disk from that equation, since state lives in S3 and any machine that can reach the bucket can serve requests.

There's no database and no leader node. Every machine running walgit acts as a cache that can vanish without losing data. It handles smart HTTP v0 and v2 fetch and push, and serves bundle-uri clones as static files. It also supports Git LFS and comes with a web UI and webhooks. The code is MIT-licensed.

The README credits the approach to Continuity, the architecture Cursor described on August 18. Walgit adapts that idea for a git server small enough to run on hardware smaller than the repository it serves. The data lives in S3, not on the machine itself.

What the README doesn't say is how walgit performs against dedicated git hosting at scale, or whether Shopify runs it internally. A single commit and a day of star growth is early traction; it isn't a production track record yet.

Continuity's premise was that a client machine doesn't need to hold more of a codebase than it's actively using. Walgit applies that premise to the server side. The machine serving git requests doesn't need to hold the repository either, only access to the S3 bucket.