Separate git accounts on linux server

Question

I have a lot of git repositories on my linux (ubuntu) server. I access all of them with the Apache user www-data. This worked great in the past because I was the only web developer. Now I have more developers and I need to restrict their access to some repositories. How do I modify my server/permissions/git repositories to accomodate this?

Let me show you the current process I go through to set up a repository.

To set up a new repository for the project project on myserver.com, I issue the following commands from terminal:

ssh www-data@myserver.com
password: (password for www-data)
cd /var/lib/repositories/
mkdir project.git
cd project.git
git init --bare
git update-server-info
cd /var/www/git.myserver.com/
ln -s /var/lib/repositories/project.git project

To deploy the project to the url http://project.myserver.com, I issue the following commands from terminal:

ssh project@myserver.com
password: (password for project)
cd /var/www/project.myserver.com/public_html/
git init
git remote add origin http://www-data@git.myserver.com/project
git pull origin master
password: (password for www-data)

The user project needs to know the password for www-data to push and pull from the git repository.

How do I modify my server/permissions/gitrepositories so that I can push and pull as project instead of www-data?

Additional Notes

Here's what the vhost entry for git.myserver.com looks like

<VirtualHost 173.255.230.136:80>
     ServerAdmin support@myserver.com
     ServerName git.myserver.com
     DocumentRoot /var/www/git.myserver.com/public_html/
     ErrorLog /var/www/git.myserver.com/logs/error.log
     CustomLog /var/www/git.myserver.com/logs/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

The directory /var/lib/git is owned by the www-data user. This way, apache can write to the repos via the symbolic link in /var/www/git.myserver.com/public_html/project via the url http://www-data@git.evermight.com/project

Answer 1

First I would have created a separate user for the git login. However that aside, probably the easiest way to manage this is to use something like gitosis which is a simple setup that allows you to do authenticated git access with granular permissions.

This will allow you to give people:

No access, read only, read write. Etc

http://scie.nti.st/2007/11/14/hosting-git-repositories-the-easy-and-secure-way

N.B. just checked the developers site and there are more features in this. Worth looking at for sure https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite/