gitolite/doc/users.mkd
Sitaram Chamarty bbaacfaee7 (mostly) doc changes
- minor typo fixes, clarifications, etc.

  - keep sts.html url consistent, because many people link to
    http://sitaramc.github.com/gitolite/sts.html

  - create a common migration doc, so the old 'migr.html' does not 404
    when g3 docs become "main"

  - progit doc done

  - add gitosis convert script (FWIW)

  - a minor comment fix to Sugar.pm
2012-04-10 15:41:32 +05:30

2.5 KiB

adding and removing users

Strictly speaking, gitolite doesn't know where users come from. If that surprises you, read [this][auth]. However, gitolite does help with ssh-based authentication, so here's some info on adding and removing users.


WARNING: Do NOT add users directly on the server. Clone the 'gitolite-admin' repo to your workstation, make changes to it, then add, commit, and push. When the push hits the server, the server "acts" upon your changes.


All operations are in a clone of the gitolite-admin repo.

To add a user, say Alice, obtain her public key (typically $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub on her workstation), copy it to keydir with the user name as the basename (e.g., 'alice.pub' for user alice), then git add keydir/alice.pub. (All keys files must have names ending in ".pub", and must be in openssh's default format).

To remove a user, git rm keydir/alice.pub.

In both cases, you must commit and push. On receiving the push, gitolite will carry out the changes specified.

The user name is simply the base name of the public key file name. So 'alice.pub', 'foo/alice.pub' and 'bar/alice.pub', all resolve to user "alice".

#multi-key multiple keys per user

The simplest and most understandable is to put their keys in different subdirectories, (alice.pub, home/alice.pub, laptop/alice.pub, etc).

old style multi-keys

There is another way that involves creating key files like alice@home.pub and alice@laptop.pub, but there is a complication because gitolite also allows full email addresses as user names. (I.e., sitaramc@gmail.com.pub denotes the user called sitaramc@gmail.com).

This older method of enabling multi-keys was developed to deal with that. It will continue to work and be supported in code, simply because I prefer it. But I will not accept questions or doc patches for it, because it seems it is too difficult to understand for a lot of people. This table of sample pubkey filenames and the corresponding derived usernames is all you get:

  • plain username, no multikey

    sitaramc.pub                            sitaramc
    
  • plain username, with multikeys

    sitaramc@laptop.pub                     sitaramc
    sitaramc@desktop.pub                    sitaramc
    
  • email address as username, no multikey

    sitaramc@gmail.com.pub                  sitaramc@gmail.com
    
  • email address as username, with multikeys

    sitaramc@gmail.com@laptop.pub           sitaramc@gmail.com
    sitaramc@gmail.com@desktop.pub          sitaramc@gmail.com