Question

I have gitosis setup on my server and I’m trying to create a post-receive hook that will checkout changes to a working directory on the remote machine.

Initially I got an error saying cannot open /home/user/source/testing-local/.git/FETCH_HEAD: Permission denied so I changed the group ownership of the working directory’s .git folder to the git user.

Following this I got the error Host key verification failed which led me to check which user was running the hook, git of course (silly me!), so I setup a key in gitosis for the git user that gitosis is running under and enabled that in gitosis.conf. Now I’m getting the old Permission denied (publickey).

My post-receive hook looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
while read oldrev newrev refname
do
  if [ "$refname" == "refs/heads/master" ]; then
    WORKDIR=/home/user/source/testing-local
    export GIT_DIR=$WORKDIR/.git
    pushd $WORKDIR >/dev/null
    id
    git pull --quiet >/dev/null
  fi
done

The id call is just to check which user I’m running as.

Is there an easier way to achieve this?! Have I missed something key in my setup?

Answer 1

You need to make sure of the value of the $HOME environment variable for the git user executing that hook.

$HOME/.ssh is where ssh will look for the private key during the handshake.
Also, make sure the ssh directory on the gitosis end has the right permissions.

server$ chmod go-w ~/
server$ chmod 700 ~/.ssh
server$ chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Finally see the “Permission denied (publickey)” section on GitHub, which repeat what I mentioned above about the HOME:

This is usually caused when ssh cannot find your keys.
Make sure your key is in the default location, ~/.ssh.