Installing Gitolite on CentOS 7

You’ll use your public key to administer the gitolite server¹. I
saved mine in /tmp/nikhil.pub.

Installation

# Create a gitolite service account and switch to it
useradd git
su - git

# Create a folder from where gitolite will run ($HOME/bin should be in $PATH)
mkdir -p $HOME/bin
git clone https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite.git /tmp/gitolite

# Install the gitolite scripts
/tmp/gitolite/install -to $HOME/bin

# Set up gitolite with your key
gitolite setup -pk /tmp/nikhil.pub

# That's it! :)

Administration

# Clone the admin repository
git clone git@example.com:gitolite-admin

# Edit the config file to add/edit repositories and permissions
vim gitolite-admin/conf/gitolite.conf

# Add/remove any keys in the key directory
cp kathy.pub gitolite-admin/keydir/

# Commit and push. Gitolite will set up remote.
git add .
git commit -m "Added blah repo"
git push

If you see anything weird when cloning the Gitolite admin repository,
hose everything and start over:

rm -rf ~/.gitolite* ~/bin/* ~/projects.list ~/repositories

Miscellaneous

If running SSH on a different port, an SSH config file is your friend.
Here’s a sample ~/.ssh/config

Host gitserver
    Hostname example.com
    Port 3574
    User git
    # Don't need if using default id_rsa.pub
    # IdentityFile ~/.ssh/my_key.pub

Then clone with

git clone gitserver:gitolite-admin
git clone gitserver:my-repository

Footnotes