Leverage powerful branch and user access control with Git for your own private collaborative repositoriesAbout This Book
- Learn to manage the many repositories and the users accessing these repositories in the Git server
- Walks you through the most important ideas and concepts in Gitolite supported by examples and use cases
- Master the most powerful tool for fine-grained access control of Git repositories
Who This Book Is For
This book is for system administrators and development managers who need to keep a lid on Git-based development workflows. Basic knowledge of Git as well as of the Unix shell will be helpful.
What You Will Learn
- Secure a Git server that has many repositories and many users accessing it
- Manage the growth of the server, both in the number of users and the number of repositories, with minimal hassle
- Allow web-based access to specific repositories only for convenience and security
- Provide your users with the features they need to be productive with Git, while preventing them from accidentally introducing inconsistencies and errors into the repositories
- Permit users to create their own repositories and manage their own access control list, but within the limits you set
- Customize Gitolite for your site's unique needs and constraints quickly and easily
- Ensure your developers always have a backup option by setting up Gitolite mirroring
In Detail
If you're responsible for securing a Git server where lots of developers work with lots of repositories, you have a problem on your hands. You probably want to implement security restrictions and authorization for certain repositories. You will love the simplicity and power of Gitolite's access control language and model. Gitolite allows you to set up Git hosting on a central server with very fine-grained access control and many powerful features.
You'll start with a brief introduction to Gitolite. The very first chapter tells you how to create a test setup so you can play with Gitolite—something that is very important when learning about a powerful tool with lots of features. You'll go from there, at an easy pace, through the most important aspects of Gitolite.
Basic access control is easy and obvious. With this book, you will learn how to restrict access to critical files, allowing users to create their own repositories and manage their own access control, but within the limits you set. You will also learn how to extend Gitolite to do very useful things with very little code, and how to fall back on a mirror in case disaster strikes your main server. All this and more is packed within this concise and practical book with easy-to-follow, real-world examples.
Sitaram Chamarty
Sitaram Chamarty has been in the software industry for a number of years. He is a Linux and open source evangelist who has sometimes been called an "open source bigot", which he takes as a compliment. He loves Perl enough to believe, or at least insist, that xkcd 224 is actual fact. His day job is with Tata Consultancy Services, and he lives and works in Hyderabad, India. His job does not explicitly include evangelizing open source in general and Git in particular, but he pretends it does. He has signifi cant past experience in language conversion and tools, as well as in data warehousing. He has a postgraduate degree in Computer Science from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India.
