Leverage powerful branch and user access control with Git for your own private collaborative repositories Overview Learn to manage the many repositories and the users accessing these repositories in the Git server Walks you through the most important ideas and concepts in Gitolite supported by examples and use cases Master the most powerful tool for fine-grained access control of Git repositories In Detail If you're responsible for securing a Git server where lots of developers work with lots of repositories, you have a problem on your hands. You probably want to implement security restrictions and authentication systems for certain repositories. You will love the simplicity and power of Gitolite's access control language and model. Furthermore, when you want more capability, there are many more powerful features lurking under the surface to tap into! Gitolite allows you to set up git hosting on a central server with very fine-grained access control and many powerful features. Gitolite Essentials will lead you through the most powerful access control system for Git, at your pace for your needs. If you've tried to control access to Git repositories using only file system permissions or POSIX ACLs, you know it's not easy. And controlling pushes to important branches and tags is pretty much impossible with pure Git. This book will help you get started with solving all these problems, while taming the most complex access control need. You'll start with a brief introduction to Gitolite. The very first chapter tells you how to create a test setup so you can play with Gitolite-something that is very important when learning a powerful tool with lots of features. You'll go from there at an easy pace through all the most important aspects of Gitolite. Basic access control is easy and obvious. With this book, you will learn how to restrict access to critical files, allowing users to create their own repositories and manage their own access control, but within the limits you set. You will also learn how to extend Gitolite to do very useful things with very little code, and also how to fall back on a mirror in case disaster strikes your main server. All this and more is packed within this concise and practical book with easy-to-follow, real-world examples.