Question

I am looking for a way to host private git repos on my own server.
I am using Github for Open source projects of mine, but I would prefer to use my own server for storing private git repos.

Can someone suggest me on which script should I be using for this purpose.
Trac is not what I am looking for, though. I want something that is, preferably PHP based solution (just optional) and esp. something that has an easier UI.

Any help is appreciated here.

Answer 1

Well, for non-gitosis/gitorious setup you have two options really:

1. Give people linux accounts with full shells (passwords and/or ssh keys) to have access to the git repository.
2. Give people access to a linux account via their ssh key being in /home/ac/.ssh/authorized_keys2 whose shell is set to /usr/bin/git-shell. This means they won’t be able to log in as a linux user with a shell and so do anything except use git on your machine.

In both cases, the user in question needs (read|write|both) access to the git repository, according to your needs, either as a user or as part of a group.

It might make sense for you to have a directory /git/project and then have user repositories in there, as having multiple people pushing to the same repository is generally a bad idea (people break things too easily in my experience). For example, you might have /srv/git/proj/proj-ninefingers.git and have a “release” repo of ‘/srv/git/proj/project.git` That’s probably what I’d do if running a team effort. Permissions, shells etc to be set as appropriate.

Note that if you want to allow exports via the read-only git protocol you need to ensure the configured git user has read access and that git-daemon-export-ok exists in your bare repository. git update-server-info must also be run before gitweb will pick up the repository, should you wish to use that.

As others have said, git gc optimises the repository and it is a good idea to do this regularly. Cron job?

Finally, a plethora of frameworks exist to simplify this (gitosis, gitorious, …). I don’t think it gets any simpler than providing access to a folder via various mechanisms but then that’s me.

As an example of my setup, it being only me, I have:

$ cat /etc/passwd | grep git
git:x:1002:1002:Antony Vennard,,,:/home/git:/usr/bin/git-shell
gitdaemon:x:112:65534::/nonexistent:/bin/false
$ cat /etc/group | grep git
git:x:1002:
$ ls -l /srv/git
drwxr-xr-x 7 git  git 4096 2010-09-12 23:31 bsdnt.git
drwxr-xr-x 7 git  git 4096 2010-06-16 22:32 vforth.git
$ cat /home/git/.ssh/authorized_keys2
ssh-rsa somehex user1
ssh-rsa somehex user2

This means anyone with the private key user1 can log in and commit to either of those repositories.