gitolite/doc/overkill.mkd

## when gitolite is overkill

Note: I wrote this to help people for whom gitolite is genuinely overkill.  I
believe it will all work, but YMMV.

----

You don't always need something like gitolite.  If you have a fixed (or very
rarely changing) number of users, and all of them have full access to all your
repos, you can use plain Unix permissions to get a lot of this done:

  * dedicate a userid (say "git") to host all your repos.  This user will also
    have a group (normally called "git" on most distros I think)

  * create a directory that is accessible (at least "r" and "x" permissions)
    to the group "git", all the way upto the root.  (That is, if the directory
    you chose is /home/git/repos, then /, /home, /home/git, and
    /home/git/repos must all be "g+rx").

  * create all repos in this directory, as the "git" user, using the following
    command:

        git init --bare --shared reponame.git

  * For each user who needs access to the repos, add them as members to the
    "git" group also.  On Fedora this is:

        usermod -a -G git username

And that's basically it.  The "init --shared" will create the repos with
"chmod -R g+s".  If you have existing repos where you forgot (or didn't know)
the "--shared" argument, do this on each of them:

        cd reponame.git
        git init --shared --bare
        chmod -R g+w .
        chmod g+s `find . -type d`

I think that should do it.

Once you've setup the Unix level permissions, you may consider setting the
shell of some of the less experienced users to "git-shell" (using its full
path) if they don't really need a shell on the server.  This will let them
access git remotely but not do anything else.

Combining this with settings like `receive.denyDeletes` and
`receive.denyNonFastForwards`, or at least `core.logAllRefUpdates`, can go a
long way toward preventing accidents or at least making it feasible to recover
from them.

----

You can do more complex things using Unix acls.  If you do, and feel like
writing it up, send it to me and I will add it here (with credit given of
course).  Personally, I can't be bothered -- once you have differing needs for
different people, you really need gitolite anyway, because you probably need
different rights for branches as well and Unix ACLs can't do that.