gitolite/doc/2-admin.mkd

administering and running gitolite

Note: some of the paths in this document use variable names. Just refer to ~/.gitolite.rc for the correct values for your installation.

administer

First of all, do NOT add new repos manually, unless you know how to add the required hook as well. Without the hook, branch-level access control will not work for that repo, which sorta defeats the idea of using gitolite :-)

Please read on to see how to do this correctly.

adding users and repos

• ask each user who will get access to send you a public key. See other sources (for example here) for how to do this

• rename each public key according to the user's name, with a .pub extension, like sitaram.pub or john-smith.pub. You can also use periods and underscores

• copy all these *.pub files to keydir in your gitolite-admin repo clone

• edit the config file (conf/gitolite.conf in your admin repo clone). See conf/example.conf in the gitolite source for details on what goes in that file, syntax, etc. Just add new repos as needed, and add new users and give them permissions as required. The users names should be exactly the same as their keyfile names, but without the .pub extension

• when done, commit your changes and push

specifying gitweb and daemon access

This is a feature that I personally do not use (corporate environments don't like unauthenticated access of any kind to any repo!), but someone wanted it, so here goes.

There's no special syntax for this -- just give read permission to a user called gitweb or daemon! (This also means you can't have a normal user with either of those two names, but I doubt that's a problem!). See the faq, tips, etc document for easy ways to specify access for multiple repositories.

Note that this does not install or configure gitweb/daemon -- that is a one-time setup you must do separately. All this does is:

• for gitweb, add the repo to the list of projects to be served by gitweb (see the config file variable $PROJECTS_LIST, which should have the same value you specified for $projects_list when setting up gitweb)
• for daemon, create the file git-daemon-export-ok in the repository

The "compile" script will keep these files consistent with the config settings -- this includes removing such settings if you remove "read" permissions for the special usernames.