Preparing for the setup

You will need the following in order to try out Gitolite:

At the time of writing this book, Git 1.7.1 is over three years old, and Perl 5.8.8 is quite a bit older than that, so almost any recent Linux or BSD system should work fine.

Installing and setting up a test instance

With the prerequisites at hand, here's how you would get yourself a test instance of Gitolite to try out:

This will churn through two of the test scripts. You will see a warning about an authorized_keys file being created, which you can ignore, and finally a message saying All tests successful, with some statistics on the test run.

At the end of that process, you should have the following: one "admin" user (called admin) and six normal users (named u1 through u6). These users are simulated using an ssh feature. If you are familiar with ssh, you can look in ~/.ssh/config to see how this is done.

Playing with Gitolite

You can now use the test setup of gitolite from the previous section. Here's a sample set of commands with notes to start you off:

Clone the special gitolite-admin repository:

$ git clone admin:gitolite-admin 
Cloning into 'gitolite-admin'... 
remote: Counting objects: 8, done. 
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (4/4), done. 
remote: Total 8 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0) 
Receiving objects: 100% (8/8), done. 
Resolving deltas: 100% (1/1), done. 

Examine the contents of the clone:

$ cd gitolite-admin/ 
$ ls -a 
. .. conf .git 
$ ls -a conf 
. .. gitolite.conf 

Edit the conf/gitolite.conf file and add the following lines, which tell Gitolite to create a new repository called bar and allow users u1 and u2 all rights to it:

repo bar
 RW+ = u1 u2

Save the file, then add the change (git add) and commit the file (git commit):

$ git add conf/gitolite.conf 
$ git commit -m 'added repo bar' 
[master 1111cee] added repo bar 
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+) 
$ git push 
Counting objects: 7, done. 
Delta compression using up to 4 threads. 
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done. 
Writing objects: 100% (4/4), 338 bytes | 0 bytes/s, done. 
Total 4 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0) 
remote: Initialized empty Git repository in /home/gitolite-test/repositories/bar.git/ 
To admin:gitolite-admin 
 f226f28..1111cee master -> master

As you can see, we've just created a new repository called bar. If you look at the output carefully, you might notice, among the familiar output of a git push command, a line saying that an empty Git repository was initialized on the server. This is useful because you don't have to log on to the server to create the repository—Gitolite takes care of it.

Let's look at some access rights. Running ssh against the server and supplying info as the command will show you what repositories you have access to:

$ ssh admin info 
hello admin, this is gitolite-test@server running gitolite3 v3.5.3.1-6-g5bdc750 on git 1.8.3.1 

 R W gitolite-admin 
 R W testing 
$ ssh u1 info 
hello u1, this is gitolite-test@server running gitolite3 v3.5.3.1-6-g5bdc750 on git 1.8.3.1 

 R W bar 
 R W foo 
 R W testing 
$ ssh u3 info 
hello u3, this is gitolite-test@server running gitolite3 v3.5.3.1-6-g5bdc750 on git 1.8.3.1 

 R W foo 
 R W testing 

The preceding command shows you a list of the repositories you have access to, and for each of them, whether you can read and write to the repository, or you have read-only access.