gitolite/doc/uninstall.mkd

uninstalling gitolite

Sometimes you might find gitolite is overkill -- you have only one user (yourself) pushing maybe. Or maybe gitolite is just not enough -- you want a web-based front end that users can use to manage their keys themselves, etc., in which case you'd probably switch to github, girocco, indefero or gitorious. Gerrit is quite nice too, if you want collaborative code review there's nothing like it. Either way, you'd like to uninstall gitolite.

Uninstalling gitolite is fairly easy, although it is manual. (We'll assume $REPO_BASE in the rc file was left at its default of ~/repositories; if not, adjust accordingly):

server side tasks

• edit ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and delete the # gitolite start and # gitolite end markers and all the lines between them. This will prevent any of your users from attempting a push while you are doing this.

  If you are the only user, and/or need one or more of those keys to continue to access this account (like if one of them is your laptop or your home desktop etc.) then instead of deleting the line you can just delete everything upto but not including the words "ssh-rsa" or "ssh-dss".

• Now remove (or move aside or rename to something else if you're paranoid) the following files and directories.

  ~/.gitolite
  ~/.gitolite.rc
  ~/repositories/gitolite-admin.git
  

• You can remove all of ~/repositories if you have not really started using gitolite properly yet; that's your choice.

  If you do need to preserve the other repos and continue to use them, remove all the update hooks that git installs on each repository. The easiest way is:

  find ~/repositories -wholename "*.git/hooks/update" | xargs rm -f
  

  but you can do it manually if you want to be careful.

client side tasks

• Any remote users that still have access must update their clone's remote URLs (edit .git/config in the repo) to prefix repositories/ before the actual path used, in order for the remote to still work. This is because you'll now be accessing it through plain ssh, which means you have to give it the full path.

• Finally, you as the gitolite admin will probably have a host stanza for "gitolite" in your client's ~/.ssh/config. Find and delete lines that look like this:

  host gitolite
      user git
      hostname your.server
      port 22
      identityfile ~/.ssh/your-gitolite-admin-username