Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke created and open sourced a database-free Git server in Rust designed to run at scale directly on S3-compatible object storage.
Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke built and open-sourced a custom Git server over a single weekend out of frustration with Shopify’s existing internal Git infrastructure. The open-source project is named walgit. walgit is written almost entirely in Rust, and it is distributed under the MIT licence, with its initial public release on 24 August 2026.
walgit is a single binary which runs in front of an S3 compatible object storage or Google Cloud Storage, and it has no dependencies on a relational database, has no leader node, and does not store any local state.
walgit makes use of a write ahead log (WAL) together with compare-and-swap (CAS) operations to perform repository commits in the form of objects in the object store. In addition, multiple walgit servers may be run against the same bucket, with no requirements for a coordinating database. It supports Git’s bundle-uri mechanism to distribute large repositories as chains of static bundles via object storage or CDNs, drastically speeding up clone and download times.
It allows local servers to retain commit structures and directory trees while streaming large binary blob data remotely through HTTP range requests, enabling servers to host repositories larger than their local disk capacity. The feature set includes Smart HTTP support, Git LFS, a built-in web interface, JSON API, webhooks, repository-level push policies, and OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication.
Shopify’s Lütke noted on X (formerly Twitter) that he was directly inspired by code-editor company Cursor’s “Git at Scale” post describing their Continuity architecture, which uses S3 write-ahead logs to treat local repositories as rebuildable caches rather than central sources of truth.
