Author: John Reese

Gitosis stores repositories in the 'git' user's home directory. In the case of git.mantisbt.org, this path is /srv/git. Configuration of the hosted repositories is defined in a special repository gitosis-admin.git, which contains a single configuration file and a directory of users' SSH keys.

Gitosis does its magic via the post-update hook in the gitosis-admin repository; in other words, every time you push changes to the special repository, it automatically updates all the appropriate settings, files, etc on the server to match the new configuration.

The gitosis-admin repository maintains a special structure of information. When checked out, it looks like this:

  gitosis-admin/
      gitosis.conf
      keydir/
          jreese.pub
          ....

The file gitosis.conf contains configuration information for all the repositories managed by Gitosis, including the gitosis-admin repo. It defines repositories and groups of users, and associated read/write privileges.

Because Git/Gitosis relies on SSH access for users to push changes to repositories, users are identified by their public SSH keys. The keydir/ directory contains all users' public keys in the filename format of <username>.pub.

This process assumes you have been granted admin access to Gitosis on the server.

Start by cloning the gitosis-admin repository. Naturally, you only need to do this once; any later changes to the repository can be handled using the same clone.

$ git clone git@mantisbt.org:gitosis-admin.git

Now that you have a successful clone, you can make your changes. Once you're done making changes, commit your changes, and push them back to the server.

$ git commit -a -m "<What you just did>"
$ git push

Gitosis will then handle updating all the repositories appropriately. You're done!

[1] http://scie.nti.st/2007/11/14/hosting-git-repositories-the-easy-and-secure-way

[0] Gitosis example.conf (Snipped unappliccable parts)

# this config file tries to show a bit of everything, most real life
# configurations really only need a "group" section with "members" and
# "writable"

[gitosis]


[group quux]
members = jdoe wsmith @anothergroup
writable = foo bar baz/thud
readonly = xyzzy

## You can use groups just to avoid listing users multiple times. Note
## no writable= or readonly= lines.
[group anothergroup]
members = alice bill

## You can play fancy tricks by making some repositories appear with
## different names in different contexts. Not really supported
## everywhere (e.g. gitweb) and can be confusing -- experts only.
map writable visiblename1 = actualname1
map readonly visiblename2 = actualname2

[repo foo]
## Oneline description of the project, mostly for gitweb.
description = blah blah

## Owner of this repository. Used in gitweb list of projects.
owner = John Doe