ngit

ngit is a git plugin built on top of nostr by DanConwayDev. It uses NIP-34 to publish repository announcements, the current state of a repo's branches, proposals (the nostr equivalent of pull requests), and issues as signed events. Git data itself still lives on regular git servers (self-hosted, GitHub, Codeberg, anywhere else), and a maintainer can list multiple of them in their repository announcement so contributors can swap them out the way they would swap out relays.

The CLI ships two binaries: ngit for the user-facing commands and git-remote-nostr, a remote helper that lets the rest of the git toolchain talk to nostr-aware repos as if they were normal remotes. After installation, a contributor can clone a repository directly with git clone nostr://<npub>/<identifier> and push a proposal with git push -u origin pr/my-branch. The branches that show up under pr/ are the open proposals from other contributors, so reviewing or rebasing on top of someone else's PR works with the commands a git user already knows.

gitworkshop.dev is the companion web frontend. Repositories are discoverable through the nostr index that ngit publishes to, and the same proposals and issues that the CLI works with are shown in a familiar PR-and-issue UI in the browser.

Why fund it?

Centralized code-hosting platforms decide which projects are allowed to ship, which accounts can collaborate, and which repositories disappear overnight. That is a real-world failure mode for free-software projects, and self-hosting git is only half a fix because it leaves the hard parts (proposals, issues, discovery, identity) tied to whichever forge happens to be on top. ngit moves those hard parts onto nostr, where the same key that signs notes also signs commits and proposals, multiple git servers act as redundant storage, and a contributor who falls out with one server can keep working from another without losing history or identity.

OpenSats funded ngit in the first wave of nostr grants in July 2023 and renewed support in the thirteenth wave in 2025 for Grasp, a distributed nostr-native git host that builds on the same NIP-34 foundation.

What's next?

Recent work covers a high-performance git plugin, libraries that let other nostr clients read and write git data and pull requests directly, and synchronization tools that keep state consistent across multiple distributed relays. Grasp itself is moving toward a clear written specification and an open ecosystem of nostr-based git infrastructure that other developers can build on.