when gitolite is overkill

Note: I wrote this to help people for whom gitolite is genuinely overkill. I believe it will all work, but YMMV.

You don't always need something like gitolite. If you have a fixed (or very rarely changing) number of users, and all of them have full access to all your repos, you can use plain Unix permissions to get a lot of this done:

dedicate a userid (say "git") to host all your repos. This user will also have a group (normally called "git" on most distros I think)
create a directory that is accessible (at least "r" and "x" permissions) to the group "git", all the way upto the root. (That is, if the directory you chose is /home/git/repos, then /, /home, /home/git, and /home/git/repos must all be "g+rx").
create all repos in this directory, as the "git" user, using the following command:
```
git init --bare --shared reponame.git
```
For each user who needs access to the repos, add them as members to the "git" group also. On Mandriva this is:
```
usermod -G git username
```
Don't forget that -G replaces the list of supplementary groups for the user, so be sure to first check if he is already member of some groups and keep those in the command (comma-separated).

And that's basically it. The "init --shared" will create the repos with "chmod -R g+s". If you have existing repos where you forgot (or didn't know) the "--shared" argument, do this on each of them:

    cd reponame.git
    git init --shared --bare
    chmod -R g+w .
    chmod g+s `find . -type d`

I think that should do it.

You can do more complex things using Unix acls. If you do, and feel like writing it up, send it to me and I will add it here (with credit given of course). Personally, I can't be bothered -- once you have differing needs for different people, you really need gitolite anyway, because you probably need different rights for branches as well and Unix ACLs can't do that.

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when gitolite is overkill

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