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I'm trying to get gitosis to work on my Ubuntu instance on EC2. I'm having a problem with getting the right key to work.

I SSH to my server using the key provided in the AWS console: it's a public key (using the SSH IdentityFile option). All pretty standard. I'm using the official Ubuntu 10.04 AMI.

The installation of gitosis creates a new user. I'm supposed to provide a public key from my local machine. This doesn't work. I'm getting "Permission denied (publickey)."

In an attempt to mend the situation, I tried using the private key from the server to initialize the repository or adding the public key to the authorized keys of the created using. I managed to move one step closer, but then I got "fatal: 'gitosis-admin.git' does not appear to be a git repository" when trying to clone the admin repository.

Update:

I found out that the problem occurred because I specified an IdentityFile for my server in the .ssh/config file. When I removed it, the cloning worked. However, now I need to specify it every time I try to SSH into the server from the terminal. Is there a way around this?

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I found out that the problem occurred because I specified an IdentityFile for my server in the .ssh/config file. When I removed it, the cloning worked. However, now I need to specify it every time I try to SSH into the server from the terminal. Is there a way around this?

A couple.

  • You can load both keys into the SSH agent, and both will be used whenever needed.

    In Ubuntu, one should be running already, so just run ssh-add on both key files. (In fact, the GNOME Keyring component appears to load ~/.ssh/id_* automatically on logon.)

  • You can have two Host definitions in ~/.ssh/config: one for interactive use, one for Git.

    Host mybox Hostname foo.domain.tld IdentityFile ~/.ssh/ec2-key Host mybox-git Hostname foo.domain.tld git clone git@mybox-git:gitosis-admin.git

  • In some cases, Gitosis is unnecessary – git can push and pull over SSH without any special configuration. (Although Gitosis does help with authorization in multiple-user cases.)

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  • Thank you for a full answer. I still don't understand something: if all users are pushing using the same git user, how can I distinguish between them in the GIT records. Commented Mar 30, 2011 at 20:28
  • @zvikicio: I think you meant to ask about Gitosis, not Git. It's Gitosis that creates the git account. To distinguish between key owners, it uses a feature in OpenSSH that allows to force execution of different commands for different keys. (Just run cat ~git/.ssh/authorized_keys. Also read "AUTHORIZED_KEYS FILE FORMAT" in the manual page of sshd(8), where command="" is described.) Commented Mar 30, 2011 at 20:49
  • @zvikicio: Regarding Git itself, it doesn't care about the SSH account, or about SSH at all. The commiter's name and email are recorded at commit time, according to their own configuration. Commented Mar 30, 2011 at 20:50
  • I'm constantly surprised by SSH, just so versatile. Thanks again. Commented Mar 31, 2011 at 5:39
  • @ gzvikico: gitosis is old now. you should try the more supported gitolite. Commented Apr 1, 2011 at 18:50

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