Cutman

A lightweight, self-hostable git server built for organizing code, experiments, and AI context.

In boxing, the cutman is the person in your corner who keeps you in the fight — keeping everything organized so you can focus on what matters. That's what this project does for your code.

Why Cutman?

GitHub and GitLab are built for collaboration, CI/CD, and project discovery. But if you're a developer with lots of small projects, experiments, and AI workflow artifacts, you've probably felt the friction:

• No organization: Repos pile up in a flat list with no way to group them
• Too much ceremony: Creating a repo feels heavy when you just want to throw something somewhere
• Self-hosting is complex: Gitea and GitLab are full-featured but require real infrastructure
• AI workflows generate artifacts: Skills, prompts, CLAUDE.md files, experiments — they need a home too

Cutman is a git server without the weight of a web interface. Nestable folders. Tags. CLI-first. Single binary. SQLite. Done.

Features

• Nestable folders — Organize repos hierarchically (experiments/react, skills/claude-code)
• Tags — Categorize across folder boundaries
• Single binary — Server and CLI in one, no external dependencies
• SQLite storage — No database server needed
• Full REST API — Build tools on top, automate everything
• Multi-user & namespaces — Personal namespaces plus shared orgs with fine-grained permissions
• Git LFS support — Large files handled
• CLI-first — No web UI to maintain or navigate

Quick Start

# Install
cargo install cutman

# Initialize server
cutman admin init

# Start server
cutman serve

# Login from your machine
cutman login

# Create a new repo. Automatically creates a git repo and pushes if one doesn't already exist.
cutman new experiments/my-idea

Built for AI Workflows

AI-assisted development generates artifacts at a different pace than traditional coding:

• System prompts and CLAUDE.md files that evolve per-project
• Custom skills and slash commands you want to reuse across projects
• Experimental agent configurations worth versioning
• Quick prototypes and throwaway experiments

Cutman gives these artifacts a proper home:

• Skill library — Keep a skills/ folder with all your Claude skills, easily copy into .claude/ as needed
• Prompt versioning — Track how your system prompts evolve without cluttering your main projects
• Low-friction experiments — Spin up repos without the ceremony of GitHub
• Ringside integration (coming) — Export folders/tags as Ringside-compatible bundles

Deployment

Cutman is designed to be trivially self-hostable.

On Sprites.dev:

# Coming Soon

On any VPS: Single binary, SQLite database, minimal resources. No Docker required.

CLI Reference

Admin commands (direct database access):

API

Cutman has a comprehensive REST API covering everything: repos, folders, tags, users, namespaces, permissions, and git content browsing (commits, trees, blobs, blame, diffs).

See openapi.yaml for full documentation.

Related Projects

• Ringside — Pairs well with Cutman for managing AI context bundles

MIT License