installing gitolite

pre-requisites

One of the big needs I'm trying to fill here is people who do not have root access, permissions to create other userids, etc. This could be a typical hosting provider type of thing, or -- in a corporate setting -- a very tightly controlled server.

Gitolite requires these:

git itself, the more recent the better
perl, typically installed with git, since git sort of needs it; any version that includes Data::Dumper[1] will do.
one user account on the server, with password access [2]

quickinstall

I assume all the files pertaining to this software are untarred and available in the current directory.

A quick install, taking all the defaults, can be done with the install.sh script in the src directory.

Note:

At present the location of ~/.gitolite.rc is fixed (maybe later I'll change it to a "git config" variable).

If you edit it and change any paths, be sure to keep the perl syntax -- you don't have to know perl to do so, it's fairly easy to guess in this limited case. And of course, make sure you adjust the commands shown above to suit the new locations
the config file is (by default) at ~/.gitolite/conf/gitolite.conf. Edit the file as you wish. The comments in the file ought to be clear enough but let me know if not
if you want to bring in existing (bare, server) repos into gitolite, this should work:
- backup the repo, then move it to $BASE_REPO
- copy $GL_ADMINDIR/src/update-hook.pl to [reponame].git/hooks/update -- if you don't do this, per branch restrictions will not work
- then update the keys and the config file and "compile"

Footnotes:

[1] Actually, due to the way gitolite is architected, you can manage without Data::Dumper on the server if you have no choice. Only gl-compile-conf needs it, so just run that on some other machine and copy the two output files across. Cumbersome but doable... the advantage of separating all the hard work into a manually-run piece :)

[2] If you have only pubkey access, and no password access, then your pubkey is already in the server's ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. If you also need to access git as a developer (clone, push, etc), do not submit this same pubkey to gitolite -- it won't work.

Instead, create a different keypair for your "developer" role (by, e.g., ssh-keygen -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/gitdev), then give ~/.ssh/gitdev.pub to gitolite as "yourname.pub", just like you would do for any other user.

Then you create a suitable ~/.ssh/config to use the correct key automatically, something like this:

host gitadm
     hostname my.server
     user my_userid_on_server

host gitdev
     hostname my.server
     user my_userid_on_server
     identityfile ~/.ssh/gitdev

From now on, ssh gitadm will get you a command line on the server, to do gitolite admin and other work. And your repository URLs would look like gitdev:reponame.git. Very, very, simple...

And as with gitosis, there's more "ssh" magic than "git" magic here :-)

gitolite is released under the GPL v2 license. See COPYING for details

3.1 KiB Raw Blame History

installing gitolite

pre-requisites

quickinstall

Footnotes:

3.1 KiB

Raw Blame History