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Motivation

GitHub doesn't let you host private repositories for free. (Also, their commit list view is silly.) GitLab's setup is ridiculous. Getting hosted on GitLab.com might be an option, but I haven't explored it thoroughly.

It was a dark and stormy night

Actually, I was "studying" for finals when I stumbled across gitolite. Gitolite lets you host multiple git repos for multiple users and gives you finer-grained control than GitHub (per-branch and read-only permissions, in particular). It's even packaged in Debian!

Unfortunately, if you install from the Debian wheezy packages (at the time of writing, wheezy is testing), you're a bit out of luck. The official documentation is wrong, the README is wrong, and this guide specifically for Debian is less wrong, but still wrong.

Setup

Actually, the Debian-specific guide is pretty close. The critical missing step is after installing gitolite but before trying to switch users, you have to create the user first.

sudo adduser --system --home /var/lib/gitolite --shell /bin/bash git

A lot of guides mention creating a gitolite user, but that means your git urls look like gitolite@example.com:repo. Instead, I create a git user. Also, when running gl-setup, it will give you the option to edit the .gitolite.rc file. You should take this opportunity to set

$REPO_UMASK = 0027;

because why not and, later, when you set up a web interface, you'll need it.

gitweb sucks (or how to setup cgit)

cgit is great. It's just a frontend for repositories. No issue tracking, pull requests... no redis dependencies, nothing. Just diffs and downloads.

git clone git://hjemli.net/pub/git/cgit
cd cgit
git submodule init
git submodule update
make

Set up a /etc/cgitrc

project-list=/var/lib/gitolite/projects.list
remove-suffix=1
snapshots=tar.xz

enable-gitweb-owner=1
enable-commit-graph=1
enable-log-filecount=1
enable-log-linecount=1
enable-index-links=1
enable-tree-linenumbers=1
max-stats=quarter
root-title=git.raylu.net
root-desc=repository browser
root-readme=/var/www/git.raylu.net/about.html

scan-path=/var/lib/gitolite/repositories
virtual-root=/
clone-prefix=ssh://git@git.raylu.net http://git.raylu.net

Set up your webserver. In my case, I symlinked

$ ll /var/www/git.raylu.net
total 4.0K
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 36 Mar 27 22:58 about.html
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 Mar 27 23:08 cgit.cgi -> /home/raylu/src/cgit/cgit
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 29 Mar 27 23:08 cgit.css -> /home/raylu/src/cgit/cgit.css
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 29 Mar 27 23:08 cgit.png -> /home/raylu/src/cgit/cgit.png

After enabling the lighttpd cgi module, I added this to my lighttpd.conf

$HTTP["host"] == "git.raylu.net" {
    alias.url = (
        "/cgit.css" => "/var/www/git.raylu.net/cgit.css",
        "/cgit.png" => "/var/www/git.raylu.net/cgit.png",
        "/cgit.cgi" => "/var/www/git.raylu.net/cgit.cgi",
        "/"         => "/var/www/git.raylu.net/cgit.cgi",
    )
    cgi.assign = ( "cgit.cgi" => "" )
    url.rewrite-once = (
        "^/cgit\.(css|png)" => "$0",
        "^/.+" => "/cgit.cgi$0"
    )
}

And you're done. Unless you don't see any commits, in which case you probably want to

sudo chgrp -R www-data /var/lib/gitolite/{repositories,projects.list}
sudo chmod g+r /var/lib/gitolite/repositories
sudo chmod g-r /var/lib/gitolite/repositories/gitolite-admin.git