An Alternative To Hytosis?

Question

Are there any gitosis alternatives that are easier to use?

I am currently running gitosis on an Ubuntu server for my lab. We regularly add new users and repositories. I find the syntax of gitosis.conf unintuitive, and even if I make a minor mistake, the whole gitosis system fails, see, for example, this question on SO. When gitosis fails, it also kills access to the git repository, which contains gitosis.conf ... go figure ... There must be a better way.

I was thinking about private GitHub accounts, but is there anything else I could host locally?

Answer 1

In the end, I just paid for GitHub . Here is what I tried:

• Gitolite : Installation is really complicated. I ran into a lot of problems with SSH, compounded by the fact that I first tried installing from a Windows workstation. In addition, Gitolite requires a server with Git 1.6, but stable Ubuntu only Git 1.5 works on my server. I could compile the new Git from the source code, but by this point I had already lost 3 hours in my gitolite installation.

• Gitorious : Gitorious requires rubies, mysql and gazillion gems and packages. As @calmh said,

  Gitorious is great at startup. It's a nightmare to get there ...

At this point, I decided to go with GitHub :

• GitHub : 50 private repositories, 25 employees and 6 GB of space receive $ 50 per month. Individual users can easily add additional SSH keys themselves and their trivial ones for my colleague and me to create new repositories for our employees. I usually like the free DIY solution, but in this case the money is really worth it.

Final thought: it would be great if TurnkeyLinux could one day improve them to enable gitorious by default .

Answer 2

Gitolite may be the solution.

Answer 3

I used github, but it gets too expensive while the number of your projects is growing. And the way he manages public keys is not very satisfying. For example, you cannot add two identical keys for two different repositories that you must add is a global key (correct me if I am wrong).

I found that having slicehost slice (or what you use) with guitar is much cheaper. Installing and managing Gitolite is very simple and straightforward. And if you need a web interface, there are options to choose from, but I personally do not need it and have never used this function on github. Access control is very powerful and easy at the same time. And there are ways to install it without root access to your host.

And you can also use your server for hosting without paying another monthly fee. I wrote a tutorial on how to set up gitolite on ubuntu, which is very simple (unlike girroco).

You can read it here.

Answer 4

A pretty old thread, but just for completeness, it's worth a look at BitBucket - as one of the users said, GitHub may become expensive for many private repositories, but BB offers unlimited private repositories for free - so far I have not had problems with git access.

NTN

Answer 5

What about the system that controls http://repo.or.cz : Girocco

... or gitorious

Answer 6

Consider using GitLab , you can configure access through the ui web interface. (disclosure: I am co-founder of GitLab.com). This is the most installed git management system and includes merge requests, line comments, wikis, and problem tracking.

Answer 7

I actually just wrote some simple python scripts to help with creating a user and repo just for the reason you're talking about. I suspect that I can force my boss to let me open the sources - basically, they read and write the configuration file used by gitosis using a python library called configobj . I set them up so that they run either as command line scripts or as cgi scripts with a small web interface.

Answer 8

We examined a number of solutions, and none of them works from an administrative point of view. We initially moved on to Gerrit, thinking that it was only for code reviews, but I think it deserves a second look. It also performs authorization and authentication, as well as a workflow component, so you can initiate a build based on commits or positive reviews.

Answer 9

• Guitolite as nice features, such as branch-level access control and has good documentation. Easy setup. Least Dependencies.

• To read only web access, gitweb should be used along with gitolit.

• Gitorious is too complicated to configure and has too many dependencies.

• Gitorious requires a passenger, if you use Apache, it becomes too complicated to set up if you have any other rails application using a different version of ruby.

Gitolite features overview watch Gitolite by Sitaram

Answer 10

scm-manager is not as complete as gitosis, but it's easy to host git, mercurial, and svn repositories with web admin, checks, and difference tracking.