Set up Gitosis, but can't clone

Question

I've set up Gitosis on a remote Ubuntu box which I will refer to as linuxserver as my host in the following commands. I'm also connecting from a Windows box using Cygwin.

I followed the instructions according to: http://scie.nti.st/2007/11/14/hosting-git-repositories-the-easy-and-secure-way

I had no problems up until I needed to clone the gitosis-admin repository to my local machine

git clone git@linuxserver:gitosis-admin.git

When I do this, the command executes, but hangs there displaying nothing until I ctrl-c to get back to a command prompt. No messages are displayed at all.

I'm pretty sure I have my ssh keys set up properly, because logging in using "ssh linuxserver" into my regular account works perfectly without asking for a password.

Edit: Over the weekend I set up a near identical Ubuntu box at home, and had no problem setting up Gitosis. The only difference was that I was connecting from OSX instead of Cygwin.

Edit: I've also discovered that when using the Bash Shell provided with "Git Extensions", I have no problems, so the issue definitely seems to be some kind of Cygwin conflict.

Edit: Just an update, but about a month after posting this question, I switched to Mercurial, and found that I prefer it much more than git. Thanks for the suggestions, but I don't plan on going back to git to try any of them out.

Answer 1

I'd also recommend setting the debug option in the conf.

[gitosis]
loglevel = DEBUG

Answer 2

Did you check /var/log/messages on your server?
May be the username 'git' does not work properly: From the comments of Gitosis,

if you look at the authorized_key file you will see that it did not import the name of the system that key was generated on but the name of the server box.

Example: using a username of “git” resulted in this in the authorized key

root@git-repo:/home/git/.ssh# cat authorized_keys command=”gitosis-serve root@git-repo”

After changing to user name “gitosis” it looks like this

root@git-repo:/home/gitosis/.ssh# cat authorized_keys command=”gitosis-serve myuser@mylocalbox”, 

To fix I created a user gitosis with home dir of /home/gitosis and ran the git-init script again.

sudo -H -u gitosis gitosis-init < /tmp/id_rsa.pub
sudo chmod 755 /home/gitosis/repositories/gitosis-admin.git/hooks/post-update

then, on local box..

git clone gitosis@YOUR_SERVER_HOSTNAME:gitosis-admin.git

Answer 3

I found these instructions provided more explanation of what you are doing when you install gitosis. Might help someone.

Answer 4

I had the same problem as you and my solution to the problem was to add the user "git" to the allowed users in the ssh config file on the server. A basic oversight - yes - but as I followed the same tutorial and this step is not mentioned it could easily be that other people forgot about adding the git user to the ssh config file.

Answer 5

I had similar problem on my computer. I installed gitosis on Archlinux and it works when running

git clone ssh://git@localhost/oslab.git

But if I change the localhost to IP like 192.168.1.1, it hangs.

Answer 6

If anyone else has had this problem, and was trying to connect from a Cygwin environment on a client that also had Msys Git installed, check the value of the GIT_SSH environment variable. It should be unset or equal to /usr/bin/ssh not plink.exe

I was able to ssh to the server as the git user (with the expected rejection from the gitosis scripts), however I was unable to clone.

I realised something strange was happening because git was still warning that the host was unknown whereas a direct ssh connection did not. This was confirmed when I looked in to the output from strace

strace git clone git@server:gitosis-admin.git | less

Searching for the sting "ssh", showed that GIT_SSH pointed to plink.exe - the putty ssh client used by Msys Git. Not sure why plink.exe didn't work, but setting GIT_SSH=/usr/bin/ssh fixed things.