Git-bug: Distributed, offline-first bug tracker embedded in Git

bonjune

Looks like GitHub issue tracker is embedded in git itself. Interesting!

lolakutty

Someone is taking lessons from fossil-scm. Looks great by the way.

bflesch

Looks really nice, I wonder why there hasn't been a project with this exact name and functionality before. When I think about it, "git bug" is quite limiting (the bug vs. feature discussion). Naming things is hard, but I can see that it might feel unnatural to use "git bug" to track features. Maybe that's totally okay because it does one thing - tracking bugs - very well, and the whole feature roadmap is living in another system/process anyways?

Aissen

b4 maintainer and Director of LF IT Konstantin Ryabitsev demo-ed git-bug support in b4 and cgit (kernel.org fork) just this week at the Kernel Recipes conference: https://b4.docs.kernel.org/en/latest/maintainer/bugs.html https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/b4/b4.git/bugs/ https://kernel-recipes.org/en/2026/2026/09/22/live-blog-day-... (shameless plug)

saadn92

excellent! will definitely give this a try

Izkata

A few months ago there was another of these posted, called Epiq: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48155570 My comment on there is about a surge in popularity of these over a decade ago, with a link to a previous comment about problems I remember them having that prevented them from being usable for most people ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47956979 ), because of their intended design rather than an implementation issue. For example bullet 3 was a problem in one, that another tried to solve with bullet 2. I don't have time right now to look at this one to guess if these apply, but might be interesting/useful for someone else.

teddyh

Just for those people for whom this might be a new concept: There is actually a fair number of these distributed bug trackers: < https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22833037 >

michaelmure

Hi, author here, nice to see some interest :-) FYI, this is my near-term roadmap: - have the webui accept external auth (like github oauth) so that it can be a public portal and accept external interactions - have the webui expose a git remote endpoint - slightly rework identities (and likely root them in did:plc for pubkey distribution, the identity system from bluesky, without being an ATProto thing), which would allow to share identities between repos way more naturally - extend to support pull-requests, possibly CI. That would make it a somewhat complete local-first forge that you can also self-host trivially Also, while there is some attention ... I'm considering working on this full time. If you have some advice or opportunities on how I can support myself doing this, let me know!

imagent

You can also do code reviews in pure git: https://github.com/google/git-appraise I used git bug before but found I missed being able to edit tickets with a Markdown editor. So I built this: https://github.com/LoumTechnologies/ticketry

cush

To me, tickets need to be too broadly accessible for anything like this to be viable. Any barrier to entry to creating tickets means people aren’t filing them. Every role at every level looks at them and edits them. Yeah yeah we don’t want a centralized service, but it’s the ideal use case for a centralized service.

intrasight

"you only need your git repository to have a bug tracker" What if my git repo doesn't have a bug tracker?

dustfinger

This is a really cool project, and I would love to see Magit add support for this. I do have one constructive criticism though, take it or leave it. I would not say git-bug is "embedded" in Git. It follows Git's command naming convention, so it is resolved by the Git cli if it is found on $PATH. I would say that git-bug integrates with git's workflow and uses git's storage. I think it would be less confusing if the claim were: git-bug is fully integrated with Git, or something similar to that. To say that it is "embedded" implies that the binary is loaded through a plugin or extension mechanism more directly than a command-convention lookup.

0xbadcafebee

I considered using something like this, but instead I implemented my own basic JSONL issue tracker, and I keep the issue files in an `issues` branch in Git. This separation of concerns allows simpler design and gives more flexibility (if I want to change either git or the issue tracker, or go without Git altogether, they're not tied together). Over the years I've noticed that "merging two designs into one" is a design smell. Nearly every technology we still use today has a very clear separation from other technologies, and is instead layered or composed to gain added functionality.

jason_oster

I tried git-bug a few months ago, and https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/issues/1023 is a showstopper. There is a workaround, but it isn't pretty. You can push/pull bugs and identities with normal, ssh-agent-less git commands: https://gist.github.com/parasyte/80ef925d4b01216f6bcb051356f...

dizzard

My favorite VCS friendly ticket tracker is https://github.com/wedow/ticket It's human-readable, simple, and easy to work with. Basically there's no magic.

zeroq

I don't quite get the problem this tries to solve. I'm not quite sure that the bug list is the integral part of the source code. And there are dedicated systems that work just fine. And if I really feel like tagging bug tracker along with my code, I could use any of those systems as long as they support file based databases, like sqlite, or simply static text files for that matter.

xyst

A rare HN post that’s actually interesting. Seems more ergonomic than the offerings from multi billion dollar corporations. Let’s hope the consultants and/PE don’t ruin this one.

michaelastreiko

Offline-first bugs living next to the code is a nice fit for tiny teams. Less context switching than opening a separate tracker when you are just shipping a small project.

khimaros

see also: https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue

sscaryterry

See also: https://github.com/schacon/ticgit