Installation
First up we’ll need to install git and some Python tools to get Gitosis installed.
sudo apt-get install -y git-core gitweb python-setuptools
Next we have to clone gitosis from it’s git repository and install it.
cd /tmp
git clone git://eagain.net/gitosis.git
cd gitosis
sudo python setup.py install
Adding your git user
sudo adduser --system --shell /bin/sh --gecos 'git version control' --group --disabled-password --home /home/git git
The above command creates a new system user with /bin/sh as it’s shell with no password and a homedir of /home/git/ and also creates a group with the same name.
Initialising gitosis
You’ll need an SSH key for this, if you have one simply copy the contents of it to your new git server, if you do not have one then you can generate one on your machine using
ssh-keygen
And then copy the contents to your server.
My file was copied to /tmp/kura.pub so to initialise I used
sudo -H -u git gitosis-init < /tmp/kura.pub
*This command MUST be run as sudo.*
You need to do the same but replacing kura.pub with your own key, it has to end in .pub
A note on key format
One of my users (@gump) had an issue where Gitosis would complain about his username having invalid characters
gitosis.init.InsecureSSHKeyUsername: Username contains not allowed characters
This is because Gitosis expects your key to have a username and host at the end of the base64 string like below
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EA ... NOHgpPwEBzpnw== kura@odin
Configuring and controlling gitosis
Now that git and gitosis are working on your server, from your local machine you now need to clone your gitosis admin and do all your changes locally, pushing them back to the git server where gitosis will automatically pick them up.
So you need to run
git clone git@YOUR_SERVER:gitosis-admin.git
If everything worked correctly you should have a copy on your local machine now, if you run ls you’ll see 1 file and a directory.
- gitosis.conf
- keydir
Unsurprisingly gitosis.conf is where gitosis is configured and keydir contains public keys for your users. Each user needs their own public key and it must end in .pub.
So open up gitosis.conf in your favourite editor and add the following
[gitosis]
gitweb = yes
[group admins]
writable = gitosis-admin test1
members = kura
[repo gitosis-admin]
description = Gitosis admin repository
gitweb = yes
So lets separate that in to parts.
Part 1 - we simply tell gitosis to enable gitweb support.
Part 2 - we configure a group called *admins*, the admins group has write permissions to 2 repositories; *gitosis-admin* and *test*. The test repository will automatically become available once we push this configuration back to gitosis later. We also define a user called kura which you should replace with your own username, each user must have a public key in the keydir with the same name as the user with .pub suffix. E.g. the kura user has a key called kura.pub
Part 3 - We create a repository section which is only really used for gitweb to tell it to display that repository publicly via a browser.
If you do not want your repositories to be public then I advice you skip the parts with gitweb = yes above and also uninstall gitweb and skip the gitweb section below. Or you could lock your gitweb via HTAUTH.
Now the changes have been made you need to commit them to git.
git add *
git commit -m "Initial configuration"
And push them back to the server
git push origin master
Now that is done you can test your access to the test repository created earlier.
git clone git@YOUR_SERVER:test.git
cd test
echo "Hello world" > hello
git add hello
git commit -m "Test"
git push origin master
If the above works then congratulations, everything is good.
Adding users and repositories
Users
To add a user to gitosis you need to add them to a group and put a public key with username.pub as the naming format in to keydir.
Repositories
You simply need to name it in a writable section of a group and it’ll instantly be accessible. If you want to make it public in gitweb then you’ll need to a [repo] section as shown above.
Configure gitweb
Open up /etc/gitweb.conf in your favourite editor and change *$projectroot* to
$projectroot = "/home/git/repositories/"
You will also need to add the Apache user to the git group
sudo usermod -G www-data,git www-data
By default Debian and Ubuntu will symlink in an Apache2 config to /etc/apache2/conf.d/gitweb which is accessible from a browser on https://YOUR_SERVER/gitweb
