Goal

A copy-paste tutorial for getting team-members to use their own ssh keys for a project

Note

The following are examples. You should change them.

• git.example.com:22 Your real domain might be something more like acmecorp.com or 74.125.224.16:8022.
• 74.125.224.16:8022 Your real ip and port will be different.
• tom Your real user name will be different - perhaps jerry.
• foobar.git Your real project might be something like omap-kernel.git

The following are not examples.

• gitosis is the user name you must use for cloning a private (internal) git repository.

gitosis users

Create your own ssh key rather than continuing to share a single key with multiple people.

ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa -N ''
# confirm and continue

Move that new key to a temporary shared location

KEY=~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
KEYNAME=`cat ${KEY} | cut -d'=' -f3 | cut -d' ' -f2`
echo "This new key '${KEYNAME}' should be in your own user name"
mkdir -p /tmp/keydir/
cp ${KEY} /tmp/keydir/${KEYNAME}.pub

If you are asked for your password when checking out a git project, you have not been added correctly and will not have access. Be sure to use gitosis as the repository user and not your normal user name.

# Good Example - using `gitosis`
git clone gitosis@git.example.com:22/foobar.git

# Bad Example - using your user name
git clone tom@git.example.com:22/foobar.git

Note that after generating the new key you will be prompted for passwords in other places that you may not have been prompted before.

ssh -p 22 tom@74.125.224.16
tom@74.125.224.16's password:

You should use ssh-copy-id so that you are not asked for your password. This is more secure than using a password.

ssh-copy-id tom@74.125.224.16

If the server is on a special port (not 22) you should edit your ~/.ssh/config

vim ~/.ssh/config

~/.ssh/config

Host 74.125.224.16
User tom
Port 8022

Host development-unit6
User root

git admin

The git admin will add your key to gitosis

cd ~/gitosis-admin
mv /tmp/keydir/* ./keydir/
ls ./keydir/ | while read NAME; do echo ${NAME}; done

And give you access to the projects you need

cd ~/gitosis-admin
vim gitosis.conf

More detailed information on setting up gitosis projects is in the previous git article.

Updated at 2010-08-12 blog comments powered by Disqus