Question

I have gitolite installed. I’m able to administer it fine. I’ve added a few new repos, and a few pub keys. Installed as ‘[e-mail]‘ and a repo added for a user as repo.git.

Does it have to be [e-mail]:repo.git to access, or is there a way to indicate the user in the url?
Possibly something like [e-mail]:repo.git or git.domain.com/user/repo.git for example?

Answer 1

No, it has to be [e-mail] because the user is always the same: the git account you are using to install and administer gitolite on your server.

The actual user is deduced from the public key you are using when making your ssh call.
If you registered that key with the user.pub file representing said public key named after the user’s login, then gitolite will be able to identify you.

For more, see “how gitolite uses ssh“.

If you look in the authorized_keys file, you’ll see entries like this (I chopped off the ends of course; they’re pretty long lines):

command="[path]/gitolite-shell sitaram",[more options] ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEA18S2t...
command="[path]/gitolite-shell usertwo",[more options] ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEArXtCT...

First, it finds out which of the public keys in this file match the incoming login.
Once the match has been found, it will run the command given on that line; e.g., if I logged in, it would run [path]/gitolite-shell sitaram.
So the first thing to note is that such users do not get “shell access”, which is good!

When gitolite-shell gets control, it looks at the first argument (“sitaram“, “usertwo“, etc) to determine who you are. It then looks at the SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND variable to find out which repository you want to access, and whether you’re reading or writing.

Now that it has a user, repository, and access requested (read/write), gitolite looks at its config file, and either allows or rejects the request.