[ale] Central git repository with multiple users

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Thu, 2009-09-24 at 18:38 -0400, Andrew Grieser wrote:
> I need to host a git repository that several people will have commit
> access to. I can see two ways of doing this, and would appreciate
> input.
> 
> First way is to create user accounts on the server, set their shells
> to git-shell, and use groups to give write access.
> 
> Second way is to use 'gitosis'(1) to manage users and repos without
> creating individual user accounts on the server.
> 
> Has anyone ever heard of or used gitosis?

> Also, I realize GitHub is a great solution, but this needs to be
> hosted locally. 

I'm assuming that it has to be locally hosted due to some sort of
privacy concerns?  If that is the case, did you know that GitHub also
has the ability to host private projects?

I mention this because it is often well-worth the price to reduce
administrative overhead.  $12 per month is less than a half hour of
time, if you cost your time for local administration, so you'd be
basically paying them for a half hour or less of administrative time
each month, and getting substantially bigger benefit.

Launchpad also does something similar with bzr repositories and projects
being private, though they give you many more resources to work with and
the cost is something like $250 per year (just under $21/month), if I
remember correctly and lets you have an entire private management suite
for your projects.

If all you need is local hosting, though, I'd go probably with the first
solution that you listed.  It's standard and gives the account holder
the choice of a strong password or an SSH key to get into their account,
or using a strong password as a fallback if they ever need to do
something like replace their SSH key (and then they can do so without
administrator intervention).

gitosis looks interesting, but it also looks like it'd have increased
administrative overhead.  Of course, there is every chance in the world
that if you're using git, little things like administrative overhead are
things that probably do not matter and can be done while sleeping for a
git user.  ;-)

Basically, though, unless there is some compelling reason to go for a
more complex setup, use the simpler one.

	--- Mike

-- 
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