hosting your own git repositories

Github is all the rage, but what if you don’t want to store your code up in the sky? No, you want to host it yourself. Or, more likely, you have to host it yourself, because you work for some giant corporation who doesn’t believe in letting their coders store their stuff in the unclean world.

So. What are your options?

Let’s back up a little. Why do you need to host git repositories at all? What sorts of things should a hosting solution give you? First of all, if you want to actually work with other people, and those other people use, um, different computers, it is quite convenient to have a central repository around to use as a conduit. Also, if you want to be able to push changes anywhere, a central hosted git repository is a not-very-confusing place to do so.

Generally hosting solutions range from just providing push and clone access to a bare git repository somewhere, to bundling repository browsers, bug trackers, wikis, graphs, ugh. The top end of the hosting solutions integrates everything you need to run a successful software project, the bottom end solutions do the bare minimum, letting other apps handle the metaphorical heavy lifting. Unless you are the only one going to use the hosted repositories, your hosting solution likely has to deal with account management (i.e., letting other folks get accounts, upload keys, etc.), and likely it will have to make trivial the task of adding new repositories to the service. Some other things that it is useful to know:

• ssh is the gold standard for pushing changes. It can be done other ways, but why waste your time with anything else?
• The git protocol and http (or https) are pretty common for pull protocols, although, you can use ssh too, of course. The nice thing about using http is that is almost always works (unless you don’t add the right post-commit hook). The git protocol is nice when it isn’t blocked by an annoying firewall.

And back to the main business at hand: your hosting options. This list is non-exhaustive, but it should get you headed in the right direction.

The high end:

• github:fi. This is the commercially available version of github that you can install yourself. It costs money, so it makes it hard to install as part of a stealth project. Count on paying at least $8k-ish. However, it does everything that github.com does, and looks to be quite easy to install.

• gitorious. (This project always makes me think of Duran Duran.) As an open source project, gitorious can be downloaded and installed on your own system. I haven’t tried this yet, but it looks like it has a fair number of dependencies, and no one has wrapped this thing up in a nice bow for you, so installation may be non-trivial.

• girocco. This is basically gitweb on steroids. That is, it looks mostly like gitweb, but also provides mechanisms to allow users to set up repositories, handles “forks” of projects, and can “mirror” an external git repository (that is, use a pull model rather than a push model). It is a bit non-trivial to set up, but has fewer dependcies than gitorious. You will likely have the easiest time of it if you are installing onto Debian “Lenny” (so I gather from the documentation). If you aren’t prepare to edit some of the scripts.

The low end:

• gitolite/gitosis. Both of these packages do roughly the same thing: manage user access. Project browsing, repository creation, etc. are not included. The basic technique with either tool is to create a single account (probably called ‘git’) on your host, then uses the package to add other user’s ssh keys to that account while still maintaining the idea that different users are committing to the repositories. Of the two packages, gitolite is still active and has more features, while gitosis hasn’t been updated in 3 years. gitolite is implemented in Perl, gitosis in Python.

Or, just give everyone an account on a machine and tell them the path to the bare git repositories. Or you could use a combination of straight ssh and gitosis/gitolite. With the “low end” solutions, you’d typically want to set up repository browsing (at least). Fortunately, git comes with a reasonable one, gitweb. However, there are others: cgit, Trac, and FishEye, to name a few.