AuthzSVNAccessFile for git-http-backend?

Question

I want to host some git-Repositories.

Is it possible to setup them like SVN-Repos with a central ACL-File? (Have a look at AuthzSVNAccessFile-Directive for example)

Thanks, Philipp

Answer 1

I have solved this in our environment with Gitolite, Gitweb and LDAP. Gitolite is extremely powerful and supports ACLs and authorization even better than Subversion (e.g. Subversion does not know how to talk to an LDAP directory). I suggest you read up on Gitolite here. Since you have tagged your question with apache2 you probably want to try using the HTTP backend for Git and Gitolite, for which you can find a complete setup guide here.

A quick rundown of our setup: the LDAP directory contains groups (posixGroup in our case) that are named according to the Git repos defined in Gitolite; access to repos is based on these groups. Gitolite uses a simple Perl or Bash script (see here for example scripts) to query the directory for a user's group memberships and can thus decide whether and how a user may access a given repository. This requires the "big config" setup and LDAP support, but you can just as easily define your ACLs statically, without LDAP.

Gitweb is just icing on the cake but if you use it, you probably want your users to only see the repos for which the have permissions. Gitweb allows for that by doing per-repo authorization based on the Gitolite ACLs defined. See here for details.

As you can see there are quite a few parts interacting with each other, so be sure to thoroughly read (and understand) the Gitolite documentation, it is quite comprehensive.