Set Up Git Server in Linux

There are many Git hosting services such as GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, etc. However hosting services often has restrictions. When wanted more control, the best choice is to run Git server on your own server.

This tutorial shows how to set up Git server in Linux. Commands have been tested on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Prepare environment

Make sure you have installed Git in your system.

Set up Git server

Create a new user for managing the Git repositories:

sudo adduser --system --group --shell /bin/bash git

Command creates git user and /home/git home directory. It will be used to store all the repositories.

Use the su command to switch to git user:

sudo su - git

Create SSH directory for that user and set correct permissions:

mkdir ~/.ssh
chmod 700 ~/.ssh

Create a authorized_keys file which will be used to store SSH keys of the authorized users. Set correct permissions for that file.

touch ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Git server is ready. Now we can run the following command to initiate a new empty repository:

git init --bare ~/projects/project_name.git

You can specify directory name as you want. But you should to create repository in home directory of the git user.

Add SSH keys

To be able to access repository in the Git server, we need to add SSH public key of authorized user to the authorized_keys file for the git user.

Open authorized_keys file in Git server:

nano ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Add SSH public key of the user in a file. You can get public key by running the following command in local system:

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

If you get error 'No such file or directory', you need to generate SSH key pair. It can be done using the following command:

ssh-keygen

The SSH public key will look something like this:

ssh-rsa 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 tester@ubuntu

Setup up local Git repository

In your local system create a project directory and navigate to it:

mkdir project_name && cd project_name

Initialize Git repository:

git init .

Add remote Git repository to your local repository:

git remote add origin git@<IP_ADDRESS>:projects/project_name.git

<IP_ADDRESS> is IP address of the Git server.

To test if everything is working as expected, create a file:

touch README

Add changes to the staging area:

git add .

Save changes to the local repository:

git commit -m "project init"

Upload local repository changes to a remote repository:

git push origin master