what users (not admins) need to know about gitolite

...written for the one guy in the world no one will think of as "just a normal user" ;-)

TOC

accessing gitolite

The most common setup is based on ssh, where your admin asks you to send him your public key, and uses that to setup your access.

Your actual access is either a git command (like git clone git@server:reponame, and we won't be discussing these any more in this document), or an ssh command (like ssh git@server info).

Note that you do not get a shell on the server -- the whole point of gitolite is to prevent that!

#info the info command

The only command that is always available to every user is the info command (run ssh git@host info -h for help), which tells you what version of gitolite and git are on the server, and what repositories you have access to. The list of repos is very useful if you have doubts about the spelling of some new repo that you know was setup.

digression: two kinds of repos

Gitolite has two kinds of repos. Normal repos are specified by their full names in the config file. "Wildcard" repos are specified by a regex in the config file. Try the [info command][info] and see if it shows any lines that look like regex patterns, (with a "C" permission).

If you see any, it means you are allowed to create brand new repos whose names fit that pattern. When you create such a repo, your "ownership" of it (as far as gitolite is concerned) is automatically recorded by gitolite.

other commands

#perms set/get additional permissions for repos you created

The gitolite config may have several permissions lines for your repo, like so:

repo pub/CREATOR/..*
    RW+     =   CREATOR
    RW      =   user1 user2
    R       =   user3

If that's all it had, you really can't do much. Any changes to access must be done by the administrator. (Note that "CREATOR" is a reserved word that gets expanded to your userid in some way, so the admin can literally add just the first two lines, and every authenticated user now has his own personal repo namespace, starting with pub/<username>/).

To give some flexibility to users, the admin could add rules like this:

    RW      =   WRITERS
    R       =   READERS

(he could also add other roles but then he needs to read the documentation).

Once he does this, you can then use the perms command (run ssh git@host perms -h for help) to set permissions for other users by specifying which users are in the list of "READERS", and which in "WRITERS".

If you think of READERS and WRITERS as "roles", it will help. You can't change what access a role has, but you can say which users have that role.

Note: there isn't a way for you to see the actual rule set unless you're given read access to the special 'gitolite-admin' repo. Sorry. The idea is that your admin will tell you what "roles" he added into rules for your repos, and what permissions those roles have.

#desc adding a description to repos you created

The desc command is extremely simple. Run ssh git@host desc -h for help.

"site-local" commands

The main purpose of gitolite is to prevent you from getting a shell. But there are commands that you often need to run on the server (i.e., cannot be done by pushing something to a repo).

To enable this, gitolite allows the admin to setup scripts in a special directory that users can then run. Gitolite comes with a set of working scripts that your admin may install, or may use as a starting point for his own, if he chooses.

Think of these commands as equivalent to those in COMMAND_DIR in man git-shell.

You can get a list of available commands by running ssh git@host help.

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