Git repository on this server

Repositories on rtime server are managed by Gitolite tool, which allows to conveniently manage repository permissions. World readable repositories can be browsed online. Alternatively, users with shell account can create Git repositories in their home directory.

Getting write access to repositories

Write access to the repositories can only be given to users who sent their Open SSH public key to the administrator together with their university assigned login name (if any). The SSH key can be created in Linux/Unix (or in MSysGit shell in Windows) by:

 ssh-keygen

It is stored by default at ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

During the key creation you will be asked for a passphrase. If you do not specify any passphrase, anybody with access to your ~/.ssh directory could access your repositories. If you specify the key, the passphrase will need to be entered whenever to use the key. By using ssh-add command you can specify the passphrase only once and the decrypted key will be remembered in the memory.

Creating repositories

There are to ways how a repository can be created:

1. Send an email to the administrator with the name of the repository, a short description and a list of people (SSH public keys) who should have access to the repository.
2. Our group staff members can create their repositories without asking the administrator. See below.

Automatic creation of repositories (staff members only)

It is simply a matter of pushing the repository to a special URL containing the login, like this:

git push --set-upstream ssh://git@rtime.felk.cvut.cz/«login»/«whatever» HEAD

This will create a new repository called «whatever» (if it does not exist yet) and push the current HEAD to it. It also makes this repository the default for pushing and pulling (this is what --set-upstream does).

If you want to set a Gitweb description for repositories created this way, use gitolite's getdesc/setdesc commands. I.e. you can set the description by:

echo "Description" | ssh git@rtime.felk.cvut.cz setdesc «login»/«whatever»

Accessing the repository

After installing Git on your local computer, you can access the repository as follows.

Cloning the repository

Read/Write access (for users with registered SSH key):

git clone ssh://git@rtime.felk.cvut.cz/repo-name

Read-only access (for public repositories only):

git clone git://rtime.felk.cvut.cz/repo-name.git

First push

After an empty repository is created either by admin or by you (automatic), you can push (i.e. upload) the data to it:

• Clone the empty repository.
• Put your sources into your cloned repository

git add .             # tells git to track all files in your project
git commit            # commits the added files to the repository

• Push your sources to the server

git push

Pushing to non-master branches

If you are not allowed to push to the master branch but to a different one, you have to push like this:

git push origin master:your-branch

which pushes your local master branch to the remote branch your-branch.

To make this behavior default run

git config remote.origin.push master:your-branch

And from now on, it is sufficient to run only

git push

Managing central repositories

Finding available repositories

You can find the list of repositories you have access to by running:

ssh git@rtime.felk.cvut.cz info [filter]

where filter is optional string used to filter the list.

It there are wildcard (automatic) repositories, as in the example below, you will only see the wildcard pattern and not the created repositories.

 C  R   W      fpga/[a-zA-Z0-9].*

To expand the wildcards, use the command expand instead of info. This command is a way slower than info command!

ssh git@rtime.felk.cvut.cz expand
ssh git@rtime.felk.cvut.cz expand fpga

Permissions to automatic repositories

The owners of automatically created repositories can manage the access permissions by themselves.

The current permissions can be listed by:

ssh git@rtime.felk.cvut.cz perms -l «repo»

You can add permissions for either reading of writing the repo with:

ssh git@rtime.felk.cvut.cz perms «repo» + READERS «login»
ssh git@rtime.felk.cvut.cz perms «repo» + WRITERS «login»

The permissions can be removed by replacing + with -.

Links to git related documents

• Gitolite documentation on DCE IT pages