Re: User authentication in GIT

From: Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>
Date: Feb 7, 2012, 09:12 UTC
Message-ID: <m3aa4vknwv.fsf@localhost.localdomain>
In-Reply-To: <1328595129258-7261349.post@n2.nabble.com>

supadhyay <supadhyay@imany.com> writes:

> I want to migrate my existing version control system (CVS) into GIT. The
> first question which comes to me is in CVS we have user authentication like
> username and their password while in GIT there is SSH authentication.

Do you use _unencrypted_ pserver, or tunelling over SSH (with CVS_RSH)?

> Can any one suggest me what is the optimal way to manage the users in GIT?
> Does all users having username, passoword and SSH key? or there is no users
> credential but only SSH authentication? if I have 1000 users in old system
> CVS then do I need to create a key for all 1000 users in GIT? or etc.

First, Git supports unauthenticated anonymous fetching via custom git:// protocol and via HTTP. If you only need read-only access to repository, it would be enough. No account or SSH key necessary.

Second, Git uses SSH for authenthication instead of hand-rolling its own security system, badly. You don't need to create 1000 shell accounts for SSH access: use tool like gitolite to manage git repositories, which uses public-key infrastructure without need to generate 1000 accounts. You would still need for each user to generate their own SSH key.

See gitolite documentation for more detail (older gitosis tool is no longer maintained, as far as I know).

HTH

-- 
Jakub Narebski