Hosting your own Git Repositories : Greg Aker

May 17 2009

Hosting your own Git Repositories

While some of the Git-based services out there are very cool, especially the social aspects of them. However, if you are working on your own projects by yourself or with a very small team and need “private” repositories, why spend the money on one of these services? With hosting being what it is today, it’s extremely affordable to have root-access to your own Server and not be with a host that completely sucks. Or, you can turn that old windows machine that is collecting dust in the corner into your own Git Server running CentOS or Ubuntu.

Assuming you know some command line, and a bit about Linux (focusing on CentOS here), you can be up and running with a Git Server & Redmine in no time!

Log into your remote machine, sudo or su to root:

yum install gettext-devel expat-devel curl-devel zlib-devel openssl-devel
cd /tmp
wget http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/projects/git-snapshots/git/git-latest.tar.gz
tar zxvf git-latest.tar.gz
cd git-date_of_snapshot
autoconf
./configure --with-curl=/usr/local
make && make install 

Okay, so now we have Git installed on our machine. To make sure things are good, type:


which git

and it should give you “/usr/local/bin/git”

Now, to add the Git user:

First, we need to add the git-shell to /etc/shells, so you can use ssh to pull from and push to your git repositories, but no shell access is allowed.


vim /etc/shells

Add the following at the end of the file:


/usr/local/bin/git-shell

Write/Quit the file, and let’s get on making the user.

useradd -s /usr/local/bin/git-shell git
passwd git 

SSH Keys

We should add ssh keys so we don’t have to type our password in every time we push or pull to our repositories. If you already have your ssh key, you will find it in ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub So on our local machine we will be deploying from, open your terminal and:

cd .ssh
ssh-keygen -tdsa -f./id_dsa 

You will be prompted for a passphrase, for this, you can just leave it blank. Now:

chmod 600 id_dsa*
cat id_dsa 

Copy the output in your terminal, go to the remote machine and:

cd /home/git/.ssh  // If the directory doesn't exist, create it
vim authorized_keys // copy the output from your local id_dsa key in this file
chmod 400 authorized_keys 
cd ../ && chown -R git:git .ssh 

To test this, try to shell to the machine as your git user. You should get a rejection message b/c it’s a “git-shell.” Really, we just don’t want to be prompted for the password.

Make your Git Repository

Now comes the fun part, make your first repository. On the remote machine, as root:

cd /home/git
mkdir myrepo.git && cd myrepo.git
git --bare init
cd ../
chown -R git:git myrepo.git 

Then, on your local machine:


git clone git@your_domain.com:myrepo.git

Again, we shouldn’t get prompted for the password, if you are still having problems, google will have answers.

I hope this is helpful, next time, I’ll go over managing your project with Redmine, a rails app that is very nice.

Greg Aker