What is Gitolite? Gitolite is basically an access layer that sits on top of Git.

What is Gitolite?

Gitolite is basically an access layer that sits on top of Git. Users are granted access to repos via a simple config file and you as an admin only needs the users public SSH key and a username from the user. Gitolite uses this to grant or deny access to your Git repositories. Gitolite is quite feature rich once you get to know it, but I will only cover the basic stuff here. The user guide is pretty good so make sure you check it out: http://sitaramc.github.com/gitolite/.

Installing Gitolite

First create a unix user called “git”, then copy your SSH public key (from your workstation) to the server. Then, run these commands:

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git clone git://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite gitolite/src/gl-system-install gl-setup -q ~/YourName.pub

Gitolite should now be installed on the server. I recommend setting up a separate domain name for the repo in case you want to move it later on, we chose “git.ourserver.com”.

Now you need to clone Gitolite to your own workstation:

1 2	git clone git@git.yourdomain.no:gitolite-admin.git

The admin is very simple, there are basically two things you need to relate to: keydir/ and conf/gitolite.conf

Keydir

This is where Gitolite store all the users public keys. And as you can understand by now, most problems you are going to have with Gitolite is to get users to find/create and send you their SSH public key. Github currently has the best doc of how to do this. The filename of the public key is going to be the username of the user so make sure you pick something that identifies the user in your organization. Here are some example users:

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/keydir/anders.pub /keydir/employee.pub /keydir/consultant.pub

The config

When you have the public key setup you need to create repos and give access to the users. The config file is located in conf/gitolite.conf. There are basically three concepts here, groups, users and repos. A group is prefixed with @ and a repo is prefixed with “repo “. Check out the following example config.

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# /conf/gitolite.conf @admin       =  anders @employees   = @admin employee1 employee2 employee3 @consultants = @admin @employees consultant1 consultant2 repo gitolite-admin         RW+      =  @admin repo internal-project         RW+      =  @employees repo comsultant-project         RW+      =  @consultants

In the config above, we have 3 groups: admin, employees and consultants. I chose to give access to groups instead of to individuals, but this simple file is actually quite powerful and gives you many ways of controlling access. It’s also possible to only grant read access (R) and to not give users the possibility to rewind a branch (RW).RW+ gives full access.

Commit and push!

Next step is to commit and push the changes to the Gitolite admin. Gitolite will create the users and repos for you.

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git add . git commit -m "Smart commit message goes here" git push

If all goes well you should see a message from Gitolite that it has created the users and repos.