git: Public read access with gitolite and git-daemon on debian ─ .:: granjow.net

This very short tutorial assumes that you have already installed gitolite. Gitolite itself does not provide public read access; it always requires an SSH key. That’s where git-daemon is needed, it will allow to git clone git://example.org/myRepository.git .

Running the daemon

To run git-daemon as daemon on startup, install the git-daemon-run package. The daemon can then be started/stopped with:

# sv stop git-daemon
# sv start git-daemon

The file /etc/sv/git-daemon/run then needs to be adjusted as described here:

The git daemon has to be run as user which is also in the group gitolite to allow read access on gitolite’s repositories
The path to the gitolite repository has to be corrected

#!/bin/sh
exec 2>&1
echo 'git-daemon starting.'
exec chpst -ugitdaemon:gitolite \
"$(git --exec-path)"/git-daemon --verbose --reuseaddr --base-path=/var/lib/gitolite/repositories

File permissions

Cloning will not work yet since the gitolite repositories are set to rwx------ . As described in the gitolite documentation^[1] the permissions for newly created files can be set in the .gitolite.rc file which is in gitolite’s home path, in this case at /var/lib/gitolite/.gitolite.rc .

$REPO_UMASK = 0027; # gets you 'rwxr-x---'

As only new files will set to rwxr-x--- now, the existing repositories which should be shared need to be updated.

# cd /var/lib/gitolite/repositories/
# chmod g+rX yourPublicRepo.git

Enabling sharing in gitolite

git-daemon only shares a repository if the file git-daemon-export-ok is available in its root directory. You could create it using touch path/to/repo.git/git-daemon-export-ok , but a more elegant way is to do this via the gitolite-admin repository^[2] by giving the special user daemon read access. After pushing the changes to the server, gitolite will create the git-daemon-export-ok for you.

repo yourRepository RW+ = example@example.org R = daemon

That’s it!

Debugging

For the error messages check the error log on the server at /var/log/git-daemon/ , the most recent file is called current . The error message that is seen most frequently:

foo.git does not appear to be a git repository

[2994] Request upload-pack for '/foo.git' [2994] '/var/lib/gitolite/repositories/foo.git' does not appear to be a git repository [2992] [2994] Disconnected (with error)

This is usually a permission problem and can be fixed by following this tutorial closely. Especially check the following points:

Are the file permissions for the repository to share correct?
Is the user and group under which the daemon is being run correct? For this example: Is gituser in the gitolite group?

It may also be a path problem. For example, on debian the base-path seems to be set to /var/cache by default, where you usually do not have any git repository.

Connection refused

Client error message (no error message on the server):

Cloning into foo... fatal: unable to connect to granjow.net: granjow.net[0: 78.47.167.22]: errno=Connection refused

This error message is shown when the connection fails. (Obviously.) Either because git-daemon is not running (check with ps -e |grep git-daemon on the server), or because it has been restarted without using the --reuseaddr flag.

The first can be solved by starting the daemon (sv start git-daemon ), the second by adding the --reuseaddr flag and stopping and then starting the daemon again. You may have to wait for a minute or so first due to timeouts (see the daemon’s manpage).