Gitolite 1.5.5

Gitolite 1.5.5 is regarded as a convenient as well as simple to use access control layer on top of git, which allows access control down to the branch level, including specifying who can and cannot rewind a given branch. Gitolite comes with a huge amount of documentation.

Gitolite lets you use a single user on a server to host many git repositories and provide access to many developers, without having to give them real userids on or shell access to the server. The essential magic in doing this is ssh's pubkey access and the authorized_keys file, and the inspiration was an older program called gitosis.

Gitolite can restrict who can read from (clone/fetch) or write to (push) a repository. It can also restrict who can push to what branch or tag, which is very important in a corporate environment. Gitolite can be installed without requiring root permissions, and with no additional software than git itself and perl. It also has several other neat features described below and elsewhere in the doc/ directory.

Major Features:

1. Simple, yet powerful, config file syntax, including specifying gitweb/daemon access. You'll need this power if you manage lots of users+repos+combinations of access
2. Apart from branch-name based restrictions, you can also restrict by file/dir name changed (i.e., output of git diff --name-only)
3. If your requirements are still too complex, you can split up the config file and delegate authority over parts of it
4. Easy to specify gitweb owner, description and gitweb/daemon access
5. Easy to sync gitweb (http) authorisation with gitolite's access config
6. Comprehensive logging [aka: management does not think "blame" is just a synonym for "annotate" :-)]
7. "personal namespace" prefix for each dev
8. Migration guide and simple converter for gitosis conf file
9. "exclude" (or "deny") rights at the branch/tag level
10. Specify repos using patterns (patterns may include creator's name)
11. Define powerful operations on the server side, even github-like forking