Re: Git and securing a repository

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Jan 2, 2008, 22:17 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.1.00.0801021406020.3010@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <477B6199.6070601@advancedsl.com.ar>

On Wed, 2 Jan 2008, Gonzalo Garramu?o wrote:

> 
> I was really looking for a permission based system that was part of git itself
> (and thus more portable and easier to admin), and not the OS. Something akin
> to what perforce or even CVS can do.

Well, git by design doesn't do that.

That doesn't mean that it has to be OS-level permissions (in fact, it generally shouldn't), it just means that git wasn't really meant to care about permissions itself, and you the user management and permissions should come from "outside".

That outside *can* be OS-level things like just permissions on files, but more commonly it's things like SSH keys and using the git hooks. In other words, pretty much by design, git is meant to be the *core* SCM infrastructure, and then you layer your user management on top of it as a *separate* layer.

An example of that would probably be gitosis, but I haven't used it myself. For the kernel, people literally tend to just use SSH accounts, and not any central repository at all (ie the kind of crazy "central repo access control rules" that centralized repos need are just not necessary at all in a more distributed usage model).

See

	http://eagain.net/gitweb/?p=gitosis.git
	http://scie.nti.st/2007/11/14/hosting-git-repositories-the-easy-and-secure-way

for a quick starting point on gitosis, if that suits your needs (there's more, google is your friend).

			Linus