Docunext

Gitolite is newer, and offers more granular control, but it spreads the security measures beyond SSH's regularly peer-tested capacities. Let me explain:

Both involve the following components:

• An admin repository, i.e. gitosis-admin, or gitolite-admin
• SSH keys
• A git, gitolite, or gitosis user
• Git hooks that trigger configuration changes via the gitosis or gitolite scripts

IIUC, the major difference between gitolite and gitosis is that gitosis only manages access to git repositories, while gitolite provides more granular control over git repositories and their branches.

Both use SSH keys for authentication and repository level authorization. The keys and the ACLs are stored in the admin repository, and the git triggers convert the ACLs to the git user .ssh/config file via git hooks. So when you commit and push a change, the ACLs will be parsed then transformed and copied into a .ssh/config file, while the keys are also concatenated into .ssh/authorized_keys - a process you are familiar with.

The gitosis .ssh/config files only ever allow a user to issue a single command

• a git binary. In fact, when "using" gitosis, gitosis itself, is hardly ever

used, its 99.999% purely ssh and git. Gitolite is similar, but it uses a wrapper to the git binary which evaluates logic in the ACLs to grant or deny access for every git command. Conversely, when using gitolite, you use it all the time.

They Don't Conflict with Each Other

These days I'm using gitolite at work, and gitosis at home. I hardly know they are different.