Re: git-shell default working directory

[Greg Anders <greg@gpanders.com>]

Thanks for the replies everyone!

>Disclaimer: I'm not at all familiar with git server setup. Would it 
>make sense to change git user home directory to be the required 
>dedicated directory?      

I did think about this but that doesn't really solve the problem. The 
reason I'd like to use a dedicated directory for the repositories is so 
that I can separate the repos from the git user's home files (e.g.  
.profile, .ssh, etc.) I am also hosting an HTTP front end that reads the 
repos and I don't want to introduce a security risk by giving the web 
server access to the git user's home directory.

>Yeah, that's what I would suggest. git-shell does explicitly cd to
>$HOME, so any chdir you do before then will be lost (though you could
>perhaps just set $HOME in ~/.ssh/rc).

I did try ~/.ssh/rc, but when using git-shell it says `/bin/sh .ssh/rc: 
Unknown command` or something to that effect. I'm assuming this has to 
do with the fact that git-shell can only run a certain subset of 
commands (although according to the SSH docs, the rc file _should_ be 
executed _before_ switching to the user's $SHELL, so I'm not actually 
quite sure why this doesn't work).

>And I second the notion of gitolite for a dedicated setup like this (I
>haven't really used it much myself, but the design always seemed quite
>sane to me).

I'd actually never heard of gitolite before. It does look like a great 
piece of software, but I'm worried it might be overkill for me since I'm 
running just a single-user setup (i.e. me).

For now, I've just created symlinks from /srv/git into /home/git which 
allows cloning over SSH to work how I'd expect. I also created a 
interactive command under git-shell-commands/ that will create a new 
repository in /srv/git and also automatically generate the symlinks into 
/home/git. It feels a bit hacky, but it works!