Config a Git Server with Gitolite

Shane Qi • 2016-01-21 14:58

Based on Ubuntu 14.04

In order not to pay Github for keeping repo private, I built a git server on my VPS. The following is how I did that.

Install gitolite with a single line command:
sudo apt-get install gitolite
create a user for gitolite to be accessed as:
sudo adduser --system --shell /bin/bash --group --disabled-password --home /home/git git
Generate SSH keys from the host which you want to be the administrator:
ssh-keygen -t rsa
When you are prompted for a file name and a password, strongly recommend simply hitting enter to generate with default name.
Because referring to my case, when I made a attempt to connect to the git server, it only try to fetch private ssh key with default file names.
So it is possibly that the private key with non-default-name is not caught to authenticate login.
Put the public part of the pair of SSH keys to a location that git user(the one I created in the second step) can access. And then run gitolite setup with it.
For example, I put the id_rsa.pub to /tmp/id_rsa.pub, so I need these commands to setup gitolite:

sudo su - git<br></br>
gl-setup /tmp/id_rsa.pub```
5. For now, gitolite is all set for me but only me. In order to add other users, I need to clone gitolite-admin.git to the administrator host(these are supposed to be operated under the administrator host and administrator user):

git clone git@$IP_ADDRESS:gitolite-admin.git

cd gitolite-admin```

To add a new user, put new user’s pub SSH key into gitolite-admin/keydir/, then commit and push the gitolite-admin repo.
To add a repo, append new repo info into gitolite-admin/conf/gitolite.conf then commit and push the gitolite-admin repo, before push the new repo to the server.