how to setup gitolite to use smart http mode

Note: "smart http" refers to the feature that came with git 1.6.6, late 2009 or so. The base documentation for this is man git-http-backend. Do NOT read Documentation/howto/setup-git-server-over-http.txt and think that is the same or even relevant -- that is from 2006 and is quite different (and arguably obsolete).

WARNINGS and important notes

Please read [authentication versus authorisation][auth] first, and make sure you understand what is gitolite's responsibility and what isn't.
I have tested this only on stock Fedora 16; YDMV.
As before, I have not tried making repos available to both ssh and http mode clients but it ought to work. If you managed it, I'd appreciate a doc patch describing how you did it.

assumptions:

Apache 2.x and git installed.
Httpd runs under the "apache" userid; adjust instructions below if not.
Similarly for "/var/www" and other file names/locations.

instructions

The detailed instructions I used to have in g2 have now been replaced by a script called t/smart-http.root-setup. Do NOT run this script as is -- it is actually meant for my testing setup and deletes stuff. However, it does provide an excellent (and working!) narration of what you need to do to install gitolite in smart http mode.

Make a copy of the script, go through it carefully, (possibly removing lines that delete files etc.), change values per your system, and only then run it.

Note that the GIT_PROJECT_ROOT variable (see "man git-http-backend") is no longer optional. Make sure you set it to some place outside apache's DOCUMENT_ROOT.

usage

client side

Git URLs look like http://user:password@server/git/reponame.git.

The custom commands, like "info", "expand" should be handled as follows. The command name will come just after the /git/, followed by a ?, followed by the arguments, with + representing a space. Here are some examples:

# ssh git@server info
curl http://user:password@server/git/info
# ssh git@server info repopatt
curl http://user:password@server/git/info?repopatt
# ssh git@server info repopatt user1 user2
curl http://user:password@server/git/info?repopatt+user1+user2

With a few nice shell aliases, you won't even notice the horrible convolutions here ;-) See t/smart-http for a couple of useful ones.

server side

The 'gitolite' command (for example, 'gitolite compile', 'gitolite query-rc', and so on) can be run on the server, but it's not straightforward. Assuming you installed exactly as given in this document, you should

get a shell by using, say, su -s /bin/bash - apache
run export HOME=$HOME/gitolite-home
run export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin

and then you can run gitolite <subcommand>

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