Set Up Your Own Git Repository Hosting Service in Three Minutes

You might have seen my earlier post "A Review of Free Code Repositories".

Well I forgot about hosting your own. Really handy for hobbyist development. I have one of those free developer servers from Amazon out there somewhere. I don't use it much except to demo the occasional site and so on.

I decided that it was a good idea to set it up as a git repository and show you here how to do this. If you are using something Ubuntu-ish remotely then this should take about three minutes.

A Word of Explanation
This is the simple setup, it avoids creating 'git' user on the remote server, but you DO need to use a seperate key for using the git service and I show you that first.

On your local machine:

# echo "Host gitserver
  Hostname ec2-XXX-XXX-XXX-XXX.compute-1.amazonaws.com
  User git-col
  PreferredAuthentications publickey
  IdentityFile ~/keys/git-col.pub
" >> ~/.ssh/config

# mkdir ~/keys

# ssh-keygen
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/col/.ssh/id_rsa): git-col.pub # do NOT accept the default

# cp git-col* ~/keys
# scp git-col.pub ec2-XXX-XXX-XXX-XXX.compute-1.amazonaws.com:
# ssh 
ec2-XXX-XXX-XXX-XXX.compute-1.amazonaws.com

On your remote host you are now logged in as 'ubuntu':

# sudo apt-get install git
# git clone git://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite
# ./gitolite/src/gl-system-install 
# gl-setup -q ~/git-col.pub 
# exit

On your local machine:

# git config --global user.name "Your Name"
# git config --global user.email your@email.address
# git clone gitserver:gitolite-admin
# exit

That's it really. To create a new repository called dummy and initialize it, you can do something like this.

On your local machine:

# set the new repository name
export repo=dummy

# update the gitolite conf file with your new repository
cd ~/gitolite-admin
echo "        repo    ${repo}" >> conf/gitolite.conf
echo "                RW+     =   @all" >> conf/gitolite.conf

# push the config to your server
git commit -m "added new repository ${repo}" conf/gitolite.conf
git push 

# make sure you cd to an existing directory!
mkdir ~/Projects
cd ~/Projects

# pull back the new empty repository
git clone gitserver:${repo}

# go to repository and make any change
cd ${repo}
echo "*.pyc" >> .git/info/exclude # I use python
touch README

# do your first push back to master
git add .
git commit -am "repository ${repo} pushed to origin on gitserver"
git push origin master

You'll be using that last code section again, so you might want to make it into a script.

Never type anything you don't understand. 

If I've made any mistakes then please let me know.