The idea of using make to build Gitweb isn’t just excessively complex, it’s also mostly unnecessary. Building gitweb.cgi from gitweb.perl only changes 19 of the source file’s 6734 lines (0.2%).

Fact is, to get Gitweb working only one line needs changing. After the following edit, all local configuration values can be loaded from a simple config file.

On line 546, insert the name of your config file:

-our $GITWEB_CONFIG = $ENV{'GITWEB_CONFIG'} || "++GITWEB_CONFIG++"; 
+our $GITWEB_CONFIG = $ENV{'GITWEB_CONFIG'} || "gitweb_config.perl";

A set of fully-documented configuration files is available in the Simple Gitweb Config project on Github, to help get things up and running quickly.

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