Installing the code

The first step is to put the source code where you want it to go. Gitolite is designed in a way that it doesn't require root (except to create the hosting user), so you can (and usually should) put it somewhere within the home directory of the Gitolite hosting user. For our discussion, we will pick $HOME/bin, because this is usually included in the user's PATH setting.

Log in as the hosting user, and run the following commands:

cd $HOME
mkdir -p $HOME/bin
gitolite/install --to $HOME/bin

For people who are familiar with commands such as make prefix=/usr/local install, this is conceptually not very different.