Hosting Your Own Git Repositories

Once you have your own VPS or other Internet-available server, you can start hosting your own git repositories. The goal of this tutorial is for you to go from

git clone github.com/...

git clone YourLandChadDomainName.xyz/...

so you can cultivate your own homegrown, grass fed code, rather than relying on a centralized proprietary service like GitHub.

What's not included in this tutorial

We will not set up a web front end. Your only interaction with these repos will be via the git command line tool.
We will not support multiple users. It's expected only you, the server owner, have write access to these repos.

Installing git

You most likely already have it installed on your server, but if not, run

apt install git

We don't need any additional software, git itself ships with everything needed to host a remote repository!

Creating bare repositories

For each repository you want to host, you will need to manually create what's called a "bare" repository on your server. These hold all the commits and any other git data needed for your repository, but without an expanded "index" in which you can just browse all the files of a certain commit in the file system.

These repositories need to be owned by the git user, and you should probably pick a directory where you will store them all. One sane choice is under /srv/git/, and we will use this as the example directory for the rest of the tutorial, but any other path will do as well.

Become the git user and create the directory

If you're logged in to your server as root and have git installed, you can become the git user by executing

su git

Now navigate to/create your desired directory, for example


cd /srv
mkdir git

Create the repo

Now you can create the bare repository with

git init --bare my-repo.git

By convention, bare repository names end with ".git".

Repeat the above command for any other repositories you want to host.

Syncing local repositories with your server

Set up SSH login for the git user

You will need to be able to login remotely via ssh as the git user we've used before. To do this, you will either need to set up a password for the git user with

passwd git

or copy your public SSH key from your local machine to /home/git/.ssh/authorized_keys.

Syncing a new repository with your server

If you've just created a new repository on your local machine, you will need to tell git where the remote repository is to be able to sync with it (using commands like git push or git pull). We do this by defining a "remote" for your repository.

A remote is just a named URL remembered in your repo's configuration. So we need a name and a URL. By convention, the "main" remote is called "origin". The URL has the format user@host:path, where

user is git, the git user we've already worked with before.
host is a DNS hostname pointing to your server. Alternatively you could even use your server's raw IP address.
path is the absolute path to the repository on the server, in our example /srv/git/my-repo.git

So, to create a new remote, run

git remote add origin git@yourdomain.xyz:/srv/git/my-repo.git

Now you'll be able to run git push origin master to push your commits or git pull origin to pull from the remote.

Syncing an existing repository

If you've already set up your local repository to sync with a service like GitHub it probably already has a remote called "origin". You can see your repo's remotes with

git remote -v

You can follow the above instructions, substituting an arbitrary other name other than "origin" to create a differently named remote, e.g.

git remote add vps git@...

Now you'll be able to push/pull with git push vps master and git pull vps, respectively.

Or, to completely sever ties with your centralized git provider, first remove the original origin with

git remote remove origin

and then follow the instructions as above.

Contribution

Martin Chrzanowski -- website, donate