Why do you need Gitosis or Gitolite?

Question

Sorry for my ignorance - but what is the gain of having either Gitosis or Gitolite.

I have a Synology NAS server running, but could I not just create a "bare" on any folder on the NAS?

Regards

Answer 1

See my answer about "authentication and authorization": a DVCS (Distributed VCS) has none.

• Gitosis is dead (obsolete, not maintained).
• Gitolite is about authorization, not authentication.

You will couple that authorization mechanism with authentication ones, using ssh or httpd.

However, it has to be an authentication system that is compatible with sshd or httpd in some form.
Why? Because the git client accessing the server only knows those 2 protocols to "speak git". (Well, the git:// protocol is unauthenticated, and file:// doesn't really apply to this discussion, so we're ignoring those).

For example, let's say you have an LDAP-based authentication system somewhere.
It is possible to make apache use that to authenticate users, so when a user accesses a git url using http://sitaram:[e-mail]/repo, it is LDAP that does the actual authentication.

Answer 2

Main reason is access control. Git doesn't support any access control functionalities beyond repo-level access, and quite often something more fine-grained is needed, such as access groups, folder/file/branch/tag-level control etc.

You don't strictly need it for a lot of projects. However, for some, this is an absolute must.