# administering and running gitolite

*Note*: some of the paths in this document use variable names.  Just refer to
`~/.gitolite.rc` for the correct values for *your* installation.

### administer

First of all, ***do NOT add new repos manually***, unless you know how to add
the required hook as well.  Without the hook, branch-level access control will
not work for that repo, which sorta defeats the idea of using gitolite :-)

Please read on to see how to do this correctly.

#### adding users and repos

  * ask each user who will get access to send you a public key.  See other
    sources (for example
    [here](http://sitaramc.github.com/0-installing/2-access-gitolite.html#generating_a_public_key))
    for how to do this

  * rename each public key according to the user's name, with a `.pub`
    extension, like `sitaram.pub` or `john-smith.pub`.  You can also use
    periods and underscores

  * copy all these `*.pub` files to `keydir` in your gitolite-admin repo clone

  * edit the config file (`conf/gitolite.conf` in your admin repo clone).  See
    `conf/example.conf` in the gitolite source for details on what goes in
    that file, syntax, etc.  Just add new repos as needed, and add new users
    and give them permissions as required.  The users names should be exactly
    the same as their keyfile names, but without the `.pub` extension

  * when done, commit your changes and push

#### specifying gitweb and daemon access

This is a feature that I personally do not use (corporate environments don't
like unauthenticated access of any kind to any repo!), but someone wanted it,
so here goes.

There's **no special syntax** for this -- just give read permission to a user
called `gitweb` or `daemon`!  (This also means you can't have a normal user
with either of those two names, but I doubt that's a problem!).  See the "faq,
tips, etc" document for easy ways to specify access for multiple repositories.

Note that this does **not** install or configure gitweb/daemon -- that is a
one-time setup you must do separately.  All this does is:

  * for gitweb, add the repo to the list of projects to be served by gitweb
    (see the config file variable `$PROJECTS_LIST`, which should have the same
    value you specified for `$projects_list` when setting up gitweb)
  * for daemon, create the file `git-daemon-export-ok` in the repository

The "compile" script will keep these files consistent with the config settings
-- this includes removing such settings if you remove "read" permissions for
the special usernames.