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 $GL_KEYDIR

• the config file ($GL_CONF) is very well commented, please take a couple of minutes to read it. Then edit it and

  • add new repos as needed
  • 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

compiling

• backup your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file if you feel nervous :-)

  • that's "backup" as in "copy", not "move". The next step won't work if the file doesn't exist. Even an empty one is fine but it must be present
  • if you don't have an ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file at all, you may have logged in with a password, which in turn might mean you are not familiar with ssh and authkeys etc. If so, please read up at least this, and preferably also the man pages for sshd and sshd_config, to make sure you understand the security implications of what you are doing. Once you have understood that, create at least an empty ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file before proceeding to the next step

• cd to $GL_ADMINDIR and run src/gl-compile-conf

That should be it, really. However, if you want to be doubly sure, or maybe the first couple of times you use it, you may want to check these:

• check the outputs

  • ~/.ssh/authorized_keys should contain one line for each "user" pub key added, between two "marker" lines (which you should please please not remove!). The line should contain a "command=" pointing to a $GL_ADMINDIR/src/gl-auth-command file, then some sshd restrictions, the key, etc.
  • $GL_CONF_COMPILED should contain an expanded list of the access control rules. It may look a little long, but it's fairly intuitive!

• if the run threw up any "initialising empty repo" messages, check the individual repos (inside $REPO_BASE) if you wish. Especially make sure the $REPO_BASE/[reponame].git/hooks/update got copied OK and is executable