Installing your own Git server

In-House

Article from ADMIN 08/2012

By Oliver Frommel

Linus Torvalds's Git more or less conquered the version management scene overnight. For collaboration in a team, you can easily set up your own Git server to store your repositories. We describe two approaches in this article.

Git [1] is a peer-to-peer system, so you don't really need a server, but if you are developing software or working on other files in a team, a central file repository that you can back up is a good idea.

A web service would do the same job, such as Gitorious [2] or the omnipresent GitHub [3], which is free for open source projects. The commercial service by GitHub starts at US$ 25 a month, ranging up to US$ 200 for the Platinum service, whereas Gitorious [4] costs at least US$ 99 for your own sub-domain.

When installing your own Git server, you can take several approaches. The two most popular are Gitolite [5] and Gitosis [6]. Both are available from GitHub. Gitolite is written in Perl and Gitosis in Python, but otherwise they are pretty similar. Many distributions (such as Fedora and Ubuntu) include the two programs in their package repositories, which makes the install very easy. The two tools use different installation approaches, thus leading to different configuration steps.

The basic requirements for setting up a Git server are a directory for the configuration and the repositories, a user account, and SSH keys needed to handle authentication. Access to Git repositories always relies on SSH, which means the Git servers don't need a separate port. Theoretically, you could install Gitosis parallel to Gitolite, but with a separate user ID in each case.

Gitolite

On Ubuntu, Gitolite installs the package, but does not set up the user or the directory. On Fedora, when you complete the package install, you have a gitolite user and a

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