Remote Git Repos on Ubuntu: The Right Way

Overview

Over the past week or so I've been setting up remote git repositories on my slice. I figured it would be helpful to put together a post regarding what I've found to be the right way to set up remote git repos. The info in this post is basically collected from several blogs and articles, but I've yet to see all of it in a single post.

Before we get started, I'm going to make a couple of assumptions:

1. You're running ubuntu


2. You have ssh access to your box


3. You have access to a user on the sudoer list


4. You have git installed on your server and your client machine


5. You've generated a public/private key and it's in the standard location

Ok, enough with the chitchat, let's just get started.

Adding the git user

1. Create a git user on your server

On your server:

sudo adduser git

2. Create your .ssh folder and authorized_keys file for the git user

On your server:

su git                          # switch to the git user
cd ~                            # change to git's home dir
mkdir .ssh                      # make the .ssh dir
touch .ssh/authorized_keys      # create an empty authorized_keys file

3. Next, we need to copy the public key from our client system and add it to the authorized_keys for the git user on the server.

On your client:

ssh copy-id git@yourserver.com

4. Because we're going to be giving anyone access to the git user who needs access to the git repos, we want to restrict the actions the git user can take. To do so, we'll set the git users shell to git-shell. First, log back into your server on a user with sudo access (not the git user) and do the following:

On your server:

which git-shell             # remember this location for the next step. mine is /usr/bin/git-shell
sudo vim /etc/passwd        # find the line related to the git user, change the section that says
                            # /bin/sh to /usr/bin/git-shell (or whatever you got from the first step)

Creating a new git repo

So we've created our git user and now we'd like to create a new repository that we can use from the clients. It's actually really simple. We basically create a folder on the server in our git user's home directory named whatever we'd like the repo to be named and them we initialize it as a bare git repo. One thing to keep in is that all these commands will be performed from a user that has sudo access and is NOT the git user. Because we've set the git user's shell to git-shell, we can no longer switch to that user or ssh in as them.

On your server:

sudo mkdir /home/git/foo                # create foo directory
cd /home/git/foo                        # change to that directory
sudo git --bare init                    # initialize a bare git repo
sudo chown -R git:git /home/git/foo     # make the git user the owner of the repo

First Commit to the Repo

After initializing the repo, we're going to do a first commit from our client machine. The first commit is slightly complicated, but after you'll be all set to go.

On our client:

mkdir foo                                           # make a new folder
cd foo

git init                                            # initialize the git repo and add a file
touch README
git add .
git commit -m "added README"

git remote add origin git@yourserver.com:foo        # add the remote git repo

git push origin master                              # push your commit to it

Cloning your Repo

Our repo is now all set to clone! On our client, we could futz around with the .git/config to make our master branch track the origin, but if we clone the repo it does it for us! So, we'll just delete the directory we've just created and reclone the repo. That way, we don't have to remember how to set up the .git/config file (and I'm lazy).

On our client:

rm -r foo/
git clone git@yourserver.com:foo

And that's really all there is to it. If you'd like to give someone else access to your git repo, simply add their public key to authorized_keys. Keep in mind that with this setup, all users will have access to all git repos you create in the git user's home directory. I'll talk more about giving different access in a later post. Hope this helps you all getting git remote repos up for all your projects.

Update: Now uses ssh copy-id to copy public key to the remote server.