Sitaram Chamarty e3bc6e7c48 lotsa doca fixa uppa

major changes
  - (src) one error message got more detail
  - long overdue fixup to developer notes doc

plus many minor changes that have been piling up

PS: to dig into the "alliterative animal" comment, check the channel
logs around aug 23rd ;-)

2011-09-03 07:50:13 +05:30

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the access control file `gitolite.conf`

In this document:

syntax
- continuation lines
- include files
basic access control
advanced access control
- creating and deleting branches
- "deny" rules
  - IMPORTANT NOTES ABOUT "DENY" RULES:
summary: permissions
virtual "ref"-types
other tips

Gitolite has an advanced access control language that is designed to be powerful but easy to use. Other objectives were that it should be even easier to read, review and audit the rules, and it should scale to thousands of repos and users. There was also, in the author's mind, a desperate need to create something as different as possible from the brain-dead, nausea-inducing "Windows INI" style syntax that some other popular tools seem to favour.

This document describes the syntax and semantics of the access control rules and other configuration directives in the gitolite.conf file.

syntax

In general, everything is space separated; there are no commas, semicolons, etc., in the syntax.

Comments are in the usual shell-ish style.

User names and repo names are as simple as possible; they must start with an alphanumeric, but after that they can also contain ., _, or -.

Usernames can optionally be followed by an @ and a domainname containing at least one . (this allows you to use an email address as someone's username). Reponames can contain / characters (this allows you to put your repos in a tree-structure for convenience)

continuation lines

There are no continuation lines -- gitolite does not process C-style backslash-escaped newlines as anything special. However, the section on "groups" will tell you how you can break up large lists of names in a group definition into multiple lines.

include files

Gitolite allows you to break up the configuration into multiple files and include them in the main file for convenience.

include     "foo.conf"

will include the contents of the file "foo.conf" from the same directory as the main config file. You can also use an absolute path if you like, although in the interests of cloning the admin-repo sanely you should avoid doing this!

You can also use a glob, as in:

include     "*.conf"

which will include all the ".conf" files from the directory in which the main config file exists.

Files that have been already processed once are skipped, with a warning.

Advanced users: subconf, a command that is very closely related to include, is documented here.

basic access control

Here's a very basic set of rules:

repo    gitolite-admin
        RW+     =   sitaram

repo    testing
        RW+     =   @all

repo    gitolite simplicity
        RW+     =   sitaram dilbert
        RW      =   alice ashok
        R       =   wally

It should be easy to guess what most of this means:

R means "read" permission
RW means "read and write", but no rewind
RW+ means "read and write", with rewind allowed

A "rewind" is more often called a "non-fast forward push"; see git docs for what that is. The + was chosen because it is part of the "git push" syntax for non-ff pushes.

Note that tags are generally considered "write once", so they are treated specially by gitolite: you need rewind permission (RW+) to overwrite a tag with a new value.

In a later section you'll see some more advanced permissions.

Side note: apparently it needs to be spelled out that "R" permissions can only apply to the entire repo and not to individual branches/tags. Mention was made of a certain popular Linux distribution named after animals with adjectives, chosen merely for alliterative purposes, prefixed to their names, and of their users not being clueful enough to know that this (the "read" thing, not the alliterative adjective thing, in case you lost track) is an inherent git characteristic.

Meanwhile, people who desperately need this are directed to gerrit, which can do this because they have their own git stack and dont use the one written by Linus and currently maintained by Junio.

how rules are matched

It's important to understand that there're two levels at which access control happens. Please see this for details, especially about the first level check. Much of the complexity applies only to the second level check, so that is all we will be discussing here. This check is done by the update hook, and determines whether the push succeeds or fails.

For basic permissions like this, matching is simple. Gitolite already knows:

the user
the repo
the branch or tag ("ref") being pushed
whether it is a normal (ff) push or a rewind (non-ff) push.

Gitolite goes down the list of rules matching the user, repo, and the ref. The first matching rule that has the permission you're looking for (W or +), results in success. A fallthrough results in failure.

branches, tags, and specifying "refex"es

One of the original goals of gitolite was to allow access control at the branch/tag (aka "ref") level. The git source code contains a sample update hook that has the following in it:

# from Documentation/howto/update-hook-example.txt:

refs/heads/master	    junio
+refs/heads/pu          junio
refs/heads/cogito$      pasky
refs/heads/bw/.*        linus
refs/heads/tmp/.*       .*
refs/tags/v[0-9].*      junio

If you did this in gitolite, this is what the equivalents would be:

repo    git
        RW      master$             =   junio   # line 1
        RW+     pu$                 =   junio   # line 2
        RW      cogito$             =   pasky   # line 3
        RW      bw/                 =   linus   # line 4
        RW      tmp/                =   @all    # line 5
        RW      refs/tags/v[0-9]    =   junio   # line 6

The following points will help you understand these rules. (Git recap: branches and tags together are called "ref"s in git. A branch ref usually looks like "refs/heads/foo", while a tag ref looks like "refs/tags/bar")

the general syntax of a paragraph of rules is:

# start line:
repo [one or more repos and/or repo groups]
# followed by one or more permissions lines:
[permission] [zero or more refexes] = [one or more users]

a refex is a perl regex that matches a ref. When you try to push a commit to a branch or a tag, that "ref" is matched against the refex part of each rule
if the refex does not start with refs/, gitolite assumes a prefix of refs/heads/. This is useful because branch matching is the most common case, as you can see this applies to lines 1 through 5 here.
if no refex appears, the rule applies to all refs in that repo
refexes are prefix-matched (they are internally anchored with ^ before being used). This means only the beginning of the actual ref needs to match the refex, unless the refex has an explicit $ meta-character at the end (like the first 3 lines in our example do).

Line 5, for instance, allows anyone to push a branch inside the "tmp/" namespace, while line 6 provides the ability to push version tags; "v1", "v1.0", "v2.0rc1", all match the criterion specified by v[0-9] because this is a prefix match only.

groups

Gitolite allows you to define groups of repos. users, or even refexes. A group is semantically (but not syntactically) like a #define in C. Here is an example of each kind:

@oss_repos  =   gitolite linux git perl rakudo entrans vkc
@staff      =   sitaram some_dev another-dev
@important  =   master$ QA_done refs/tags/v[0-9]

The syntax of a group definition is simply:

@groupname = [one or more names]

A group can accumulate values. For example:

@staff      =   sitaram some_dev another-dev
@staff      =   au.thor

is the same as

@staff      =   sitaram some_dev another-dev au.thor

This is more convenient than continuation lines, because it allows you to add to a group anywhere. Many people generate their gitolite.conf itself from some other database, and it is very useful to be able to do this sort of thing.

Groups can include other groups, and the included group will be expanded to whatever value it currently has:

@staff      =   sitaram some_dev another-dev    # line 1
@staff      =   au.thor                         # line 2
@interns    =   indy james                      # line 3
@alldevs    =   bob @interns @staff             # line 4

"@alldevs" expands to 7 names now. However, remember that the config file is parsed in a single-pass, so later additions to a group name cannot affect earlier uses of it. If you moved line 2 to the end, "@alldevs" would only have 6 names in it.

the special `@all` group

There's a special group called @all that includes all authenticated users when used as a username; you've seen examples of it earlier.

[Advanced users: also see the entry for GL_ALL_INCLUDES_SPECIAL in doc/gitolite.rc.mkd.]

When used as a reponame, it includes all repos.

advanced access control

The previous section is sufficient for most common needs, but gitolite can go a lot further than that.

creating and deleting branches

Since the beginning of gitolite, RW gave the ability, not only to update, but to create a branch (that matched the refex). Similarly, RW+ meant being able to not only rewind, but also delete a ref. Conceptually, a rewind is almost the same as a delete+push (the only difference I can see is if you had core.logAllRefUpdates set, which is not a default setting).

However, there seem to be cases where it is useful to distinguish these cases. Arguments can be made on all sides if you're dealing with new users, so gitolite supports that.

We'll look at the delete/rewind case in detail first:

if the rules for a repo do not contain a D anywhere, then RW+ will allow both rewind and delete operations. Apart from being more convenient if you don't need this separation, this also ensures backward compatibility for setups created before this separation feature was added to gitolite).
if, however, any of the rules for a repo contains a D (example: RWD, RW+D, etc) then RW+ by itself will permit only a rewind, not a delete

The same thing applies to create/push, where if you have a permissions like RWC or RW+C anywhere, a simple RW or RW+ can no longer create a new ref.

You can combine the C and D also. Thus, the set of permissions you now know about are, in regex syntax: R|RW+?C?D?. See a later section for the full set of permissions possible.

Some usage hints:

if you find that RW+ no longer allows creation/deletion but you can't see a C/D permission in the rules, remember that gitolite allows a repo config to be specified in multiple places for convenience, included delegated or included files. Be sure to search everywhere :)
a quick way to make this the default for all your repos is:
```
repo @all
    RWCD    dummy-branch    =   foo
```
where foo can be either the administrator, or if you can ignore the warning message when you push, a non-existant user.

"deny" rules

Take a look at the following snippet, which seems to say that "bruce" can write versioned tags (anything containing refs/tags/v[0-9]), but the other staffers can't:

    @staff = bruce whitfield martin
            [... and later ...]
    RW refs/tags/v[0-9]     = bruce
    RW refs/tags            = @staff

But that's not how the matching works. As long as any refex matches the refname being updated, it's a "yes". Since the second refex (which says "anything containing refs/tags") is a superset of the first one, it lets anyone on @staff create versioned tags, not just Bruce.

So how do we say "these people can create any tags except tags that look like this pattern"?

One way to fix this is to allow "deny" rules. We make a small addition to the permissions syntax, and define a more rigorous, ordered, interpretation.

Let's recap the existing semantics:

The first matching refex that has the permission you're looking for (W or +), results in success. A fallthrough results in failure.

Here are the new semantics, with changes from the "main" one in bold:

The first matching refex that has the permission you're looking for (W or +) or a minus (-), results in success or failure, respectively. A fallthrough also results in failure.

So the example we started with becomes, if you use "deny" rules:

    RW refs/tags/v[0-9]     = bruce
    -  refs/tags/v[0-9]     = @staff
    RW refs/tags            = @staff

And here's how it works:

for non-version tags, only the 3rd rule matches, so anyone on staff can push them
for version tags by bruce, the first rule matches so he can push them
for version tags by staffers other than bruce, the second rule matches before the third one, and it has a - as the permission, so the push fails

IMPORTANT NOTES ABOUT "DENY" RULES:

deny rules do NOT affect read access. They only apply to write access.
when using deny rules, the order of your rules starts to matter, where earlier it did not. If you're just starting to add a deny rule to an existing ruleset, it's a good idea to review the entire ruleset once, to make sure you're doing it right.

summary: permissions

The full set of permissions, in regex syntax: -|R|RW+?C?D?. This expands to one of -, R, RW, RW+, RWC, RW+C, RWD, RW+D, RWCD, or RW+CD. and by now you know what they all mean.

[Side note: There is one more very important permissions to be dealt with -- the standalone C, which is not really a "ref" level permission and can be found in doc/wildcard-repositories.mkd.]

virtual "ref"-types

This is a highly advanced topic; see doc/virtualrefs-and-scoring.mkd for details.

other tips

personal branches

Gitolite lets you define a "personal" or "scratch" namespace prefix for each developer (for example, refs/personal/<devname>/*); see the "personal branches" section in doc/3-faq-tips-etc.mkd for details.

splitting up rules into rulesets

Gitolite lets you specify access rules for a repo in bits and pieces. This can be very convenient sometimes. Let's say you have a mix of open source and closed source projects, and "bosses" should have read access to all projects, and everyone should have read access to open source projects. Assuming the appropriate group definitions, this would work:

# all bosses have read access to all projects
repo @open @closed @topsecret
    R   =   @bosses

# everyone has read access to "open" projects
repo @open
    R   =   @bosses @devs @interns

If you notice that @bosses are given read access to @open via both rules, don't worry that this causes some duplication or inefficiency. It doesn't :-)

Elsewhere in the file, you would specify access for individual repos (like RW, RW+, etc). Gitolite combines all of these access rules, maintaining the textual order in which they occur, when authorising a push.

And although this example used groups, you can use reponames as well, or mix and match them. You can even distribute rulesets across multiple "include" files if you wish.

Just remember that if you use deny rules anywhere then the order of the rules matters!

This feature also helps people who generate their gitolite.conf itself from some other database -- it allows them much more flexibility in how they generate rules.

gitweb and daemon

Gitolite allows you to specify access for git-daemon and gitweb. See this for more on this.

repo specific `git config` commands

(Thanks to teemu dot matilainen at iki dot fi)

Note

: this won't work unless the rc file has the right settings; please see $GL_GITCONFIG_KEYS in doc/gitolite.rc.mkd for details and security information.

Sometimes you want to specify git config settings for your repos.

For example, say you have a custom post-receive hook that sends an email when a push happens, and this hook looks in the config for whom to send the email to, etc.

You can set these git config values within a "repo" paragraph:

repo gitolite
    config hooks.mailinglist = gitolite-commits@example.tld
    config hooks.emailprefix = "[gitolite] "
    config foo.bar = ""
    config foo.baz =

The syntax is simple:

config sectionname.keyname = [optional value_string]

This does either a plain "git config section.key value" (for the first 3 examples above) or "git config --unset-all section.key" (for the last example). Other forms of the git config command (--add, the value_regex, etc) are not supported.

WARNING: simply deleting the config line from the conf/gitolite.conf file will not delete the variable from repo.git/config. The syntax in the last example is the only way to make gitolite execute a --unset-all operation on the given key.

You can repeat the 'config' line as many times as you like, and the last occurrence will be the one in effect. This allows you to override settings just for one project, as in this example:

repo @all
    config gitolite.mirror.master = "frodo"
    config gitolite.mirror.slaves = "sam gollum"

repo top-secret-project
    # only sam, because we don't trust gollum
    config gitolite.mirror.slaves = "sam"

The "delete config variable" syntax can also be used, if you wish:

repo highlander     # there can be only one!
    config gitolite.mirror.master =
    config gitolite.mirror.slaves =

As you can see, the general idea is to place the most generic ones (repo @all, or repo patterns like repo foo.*) first, and place more specific ones later to override the generic settings.

repo owner/description line for gitweb

Including a line like this:

gitolite "Sitaram Chamarty" = "fast, secure, access control for git in a corporate environment"

sets the owner name and description for gitweb. The general syntax is very simple, just use one of:

reponame = "some description string in double quotes"
reponame "owner name" = "some description string in double quotes"

Note: setting a description also gives gitweb access; you do not have to give gitweb access explicitly (as described or linked above) if you're specifying a description.

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the access control file gitolite.conf