# #syntax basic syntax

In general, everything is **space separated**; there are no commas,
semicolons, etc., in the syntax.

**Comments** are in the usual shell-ish style.

**User names** and **repo names** are as simple as possible; they must start
with an alphanumeric, but after that they can also contain `.`, `_`, or `-`.

Usernames can optionally be followed by an `@` and a domainname containing at
least one `.` (this allows you to use an email address as someone's username).
Reponames can contain `/` characters (this allows you to put your repos in a
tree-structure for convenience)

There are no continuation lines by default.  You do not need them; the section
on "groups" will tell you how you can break up large lists of names in a group
definition into multiple lines.

<font color="gray">If you *must* have them, you can optionally enable them;
see the syntactic [sugar][] section.</font>

## #include include files

Gitolite allows you to break up the configuration into multiple files and
include them in the main file for convenience.

    include     "foo.conf"

will include the contents of the file "foo.conf".

Details:

  * You can also use a glob (`include "*.conf"`), or put your include files
    into subdirectories of "conf" (`include "foo/bar.conf"`), or both
    (`include "repos/*.conf"`).

  * Included files are always searched from the gitolite-admin repo's "conf/"
    directory, unless you supplied an absolute path.  (Note: in the interests
    of cloning the admin-repo sanely you should avoid absolute paths!)

  * If you ended up recursing, files that have been already processed once are
    skipped, with a warning.

<font color="gray">Advanced users: `subconf`, a command that is very closely
related to `include`, is documented [here][subconf].</font>