Installing Gitosis on EC2/Ubuntu

Question

I'm trying to get gitosis to work on my Ubuntu instance on EC2. I'm having a problem with getting the right key to work.

I SSH to my server using the key provided in the AWS console: it's a public key (using the SSH IdentityFile option). All pretty standard. I'm using the official Ubuntu 10.04 AMI.

The installation of gitosis creates a new user. I'm supposed to provide a public key from my local machine. This doesn't work. I'm getting "Permission denied (publickey)."

In an attempt to mend the situation, I tried using the private key from the server to initialize the repository or adding the public key to the authorized keys of the created using. I managed to move one step closer, but then I got "fatal: 'gitosis-admin.git' does not appear to be a git repository" when trying to clone the admin repository.

Update:

I found out that the problem occurred because I specified an IdentityFile for my server in the .ssh/config file. When I removed it, the cloning worked. However, now I need to specify it every time I try to SSH into the server from the terminal. Is there a way around this?

Answer 1

I found out that the problem occurred because I specified an IdentityFile for my server in the .ssh/config file. When I removed it, the cloning worked. However, now I need to specify it every time I try to SSH into the server from the terminal. Is there a way around this?

A couple.

• You can load both keys into the SSH agent, and both will be used whenever needed.

  In Ubuntu, one should be running already, so just run ssh-add on both key files. (In fact, the GNOME Keyring component appears to load ~/.ssh/id_* automatically on logon.)

• You can have two Host definitions in ~/.ssh/config: one for interactive use, one for Git.

  Host mybox
      Hostname foo.domain.tld
      IdentityFile ~/.ssh/ec2-key
  
  Host mybox-git
      Hostname foo.domain.tld
  
  git clone git@mybox-git:gitosis-admin.git
  

• In some cases, Gitosis is unnecessary – git can push and pull over SSH without any special configuration. (Although Gitosis does help with authorization in multiple-user cases.)