# interfacing with external tools

>   ----

>   **Note**: The old gitolite (v1.x, v2.x) used to tie itself into knots
>   dealing with gitweb and daemon.  One of the goals of g3 was to get out of
>   that game, which your author does not play anyway.  This means statements
>   like "...special user called 'gitweb'..." really apply to the [non-core][]
>   programs that gitolite ships with, not to "core" gitolite, and any or all
>   of this functionality can be disabled by commenting out certain lines in
>   the [rc][] file.

>   ----

>   Also, **note** that gitolite does **not** install or configure
>   gitweb/git-daemon -- that is a one-time setup you must do separately.

>   ----

## gitweb

The following repos are deemed to be readable by gitweb:

  * any repos readable by the special user `gitweb`
  * any repos containing one or more of the following types of lines:

        config gitweb.owner         =   owner name
        config gitweb.description   =   some description
        config gitweb.category      =   some category

    Side note: the following shorter forms are available as [syntactic
    sugar][sugar] for the above longer forms:

        owner       =   owner name
        desc        =   some description
        category    =   some category

The list of gitweb-readable repos is written to a file whose name is given by
the [rc][] file variable `GITWEB_PROJECTS_LIST`.  The default value of this
variable, if it is not specified or empty, is `$HOME/projects.list`.

In addition, each of the config variables described above is written to the
repo to which it pertains, so that gitweb can use them.

### #umask changing the UMASK

Gitweb typically runs under a different userid, and the default permissions
that gitolite sets make them unreadable.

See the section on the `UMASK` variable in the documentation for the [rc
file][rc].

## git-daemon

Any repo readable by the special user `daemon` is deemed to be readable by
git-daemon.  For each of these repos, an empty file called
`git-daemon-export-ok` is created in the repository (i.e., the `repo.git`
directory inside `$HOME/repositories`).

## tips

Setting descriptions en-masse usually does not make sense, but you can
certainly do things like

    repo @all
        R       =   gitweb daemon

assuming you have other means of setting 'gitweb.description' and
'gitweb.owner'.

Also see [this][deny-rules] for a twist on that.