Git on Gentoo?

I wanted a while ago to set-up my own private git repositories on my vserver, but never got the time to dig into it properly.

I have installed git with gitosis on ubuntu and on mac osX several times in the past months, but I have to admit that although I’ve done it all in command line on the servers, the internals were still a bit obscure to me. My vserver runs Gentoo, and initially I installed git and gitosis via emerge.

However, unlike my previous installs where I blindly (but successfully) followed the instructions and how-tos, I could not find anything else than how to host a public repository on Gentoo. Remember: these instructions are for a public repo!

That means that you’ll be able to pull from the server, but not push.

The explanation is simple: the way it’s presented will only ever user git-daemon, provided by git, that is designed to only server pull requests.

These instructions work well and in 10 minutes I had a public repo working flawlessly, but I wanted a private one where I could push my code and use it for automated deployments.

Killing git-daemon – Back to square one. Like many out there, I guess, I followed the excellent scie.nti.st guide.

For Gentoo, this has to be changed slightly though.

Assuming you’ve setup git and it’s working fine

emerge -av dev-util/git

you haved cloned gitosis

git clone git://eagain.net/gitosis.git

and you are trying to install it

cd gitosis
python setup.py install

python setup tools might not be installed on your system. On gentoo, to install them, use the following

emerge -av dev-python/setuptools

Adding the git user takes slightly different options too

adduser \
--system   \
--shell /bin/sh   \
--comment   'git version control'  \
--home-dir   /home/git   \
git

Now, the part that confused me, the gitosis init. As there is no sudo on my system (and I believe on many others), i could not execute the indicated command. Ok, no big deal in the end, just do by hand what the sudo options do for you:

By becoming the git user and switching to its home directory, you cover the -H and -u options of the sudo command that you’d otherwise use on other systems.

su git
cd /home/git

then run the init script with the public key of your remote account uploaded in the /tmp folder f your server

gitosis-init < /tmp/id_rsa.pub

Now follow the rest of the tutorial and you’re good to go.

Just one last thing, unlike the automatic emerge of the gitosis ebuild, your repositories will be in /home/git/repositories by default.

If you ALSO want public repositories, you can always use git-daemon when you want too. It works independently and can be in parallel of gitosis.