Sharing Repositories

Over Git

Git provides its own special protocol, which is basically just a really thin wrapper over the 'git-upload-pack' command that will tell you what is available, then you tell it what you have and it gives you a packfile of the difference. To start it up manually, run something like the following command:

git-daemon --detach --export-all --base-path=/opt/git /opt/git/ambition

Though for long term running, you'll likely want to add this to your inet.d configuration. See the git-daemon docs for specific information on how to set that up.

The git protocol has no built in authentication, so generally you cannot push over it (although some people have open push policies and so allow that - I would not recommend setting that up, so you'll have to look up how to do that). If you want your users to have push access, it's recommended to use the SSH protocol. Many repositories, like GitHub, have SSH enabled for account owners to push over, and git-daemon enabled for the public to pull over - which is often the most efficient combination.

Over SSH

Git can work entirely over SSH - it actually does much the same thing that happens over the git protocol, except it implicitly has authentication built in. If a user has SSH and write access to the repo and its subdirectories, then that user can push over SSH as well.

$ git clone --bare
scp -r project.bare user@host:/repos/project.git
git clone user@host:/repos/project.git

Git ships with the git-shell, a slightly more secure shell that restricts the user to performing only Git-related actions. If you use SSH public keys, you won't need to give out any passwords or create user accounts for other developers who need to have write-access to the repository. However, the restricted git user needs to have write access to the files and directories in the repository, which can be slightly awkward to setup and maintain.

Over HTTP

This is pretty easy to setup because there is no requirement other than a static web server - it is not like SVN which requires a DAV server to run. If you want to push over http, however, you will need DAV setup - it's generally a much better idea to use SSH to do so, however.

The only caveat is that you need to run git update-server-info each time you commit to the repository.

git update-server-info

It is generally a good idea to put this in the post-commit hook file on any server that you want to be able to fetch from over HTTP.

NOTE
Actually, you can run this without update-server-info if you never pack objects and you have a pre-defined list of branches you are always fetching. All update-server-info does is put a list of branches into one file (.git/info/refs) and a list of pack files into another (.git/objects/info/pack) to get around the fact that you cannot reliably list contents of a directory over HTTP - it's not built into the protocol. So for Git to know what packfiles and branches are available, it needs to have one URL it can get those from.