Git Over HTTP (git-http-backend)

I found really annoying that all Git guides I found talked about using Git over SSH, thats because I googled until I found that Git now comes with git-http-backend, which lets you to configure your webserver to serve git over HTTP/HTTPS.

apt-get install git-core

Once git is installed we will found git-http-backend under /usr/lib/git-core/git-http-backend. Next step is to setup the Apache configuration:

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
<VirtualHost *:443>
    SSLEngine on
 
    SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/server.crt
    SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/server.key
    SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown
 
    ServerName git.example.com
    ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/git-error.log
    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/git-access.log combined
 
    # GIT Config
    SetEnv GIT_PROJECT_ROOT /opt/git/repositories
    SetEnv GIT_HTTP_EXPORT_ALL
 
    # Route Git-Http-Backend
    ScriptAlias / /usr/lib/git-core/git-http-backend/
 
    # Require Acces for all resources
    <Location />
        AuthType Basic
        AuthName "Private"
        Require valid-user
        AuthUserFile /opt/git/user.passwd
    </Location>
</VirtualHost>
</IfModule>

Now we only need to create our repositories under /opt/git/repositories (The repositories must be owned by the apache user to work):

cd /opt/git/repositories
git --bare init test.git
chown -R www-data:www-data /opt/git/repositories

And thats all, now we can checkout the repository using the url https://git.example.com/test.git:

git clone https://username@git.example.com/test.git
cd test
mkdir testdir
touch testdir/README
git add .
git commit -m 'test commit'
git push origin master

This two environment variables are usefull to avoid problems checking out your repository:

# Disable SSL Certificate verification,
# usefull with self-signed certificates
export GIT_SSL_NO_VERIFY=true

# Activates verbosity for HTTP Requests
export GIT_CURL_VERBOSE=1