sgorblex/GitKiss

GitKiss

GitKiss is a SSH Git server manager. It lets you create and organize users, repositories and more through SSH commands and a basic interactive shell. KISS is the principle of Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Motivation

Having a Git server is a big deal. And, by the way, you don't need an always-on server to have one. You can install GitKiss on your machine and just SSH into localhost. The purpose of GitKiss is providing something similar to Gitolite but with easier user/repo management.

Installation

Generate an SSH key pair. For example:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f mykey

Make sure you have sudo access and run:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sgorblex/GitKiss/master/install.sh
chmod +x install.sh
./install.sh

Choose the owner's nickname and paste their public key (mykey.pub).

Make sure you have an SSH server running.

Custom install

You may instead configure installation paths by using command line arguments as follows:

./install.sh --help

However, default values should generally be fine.

The server is entirely passive, meaning there are no daemons running, except for git-daemon, which is enabled by default on systemd (port 1234) and serves the public repositories. If you so desire you can disable it with systemctl disable --now gitkiss-daemon.service.

Usage

Commands

Assuming you are using the default system user gitkiss and your server is host, the command

ssh -i mykey gitkiss@host help

lists available commands for your user. Substitute help with your desired command.

Interactive shell

Unless the config disables it, run

ssh -i mykey gitkiss@host

to start the interactive shell, where you can launch any command until you write exit or hit CTRLD.

Git commands

You can push, pull or clone a repo you have access to with usual git commands, e.g.:

export GIT_SSH_COMMAND="ssh -i mykey"
git clone gitkiss@host:repo_owner/repo_name

You can omit the repo owner if you want to clone one of your repos. To avoid the export, see tips. Of course, you cannot clone repos you don't have read permission on and you cannot push to repos you don't have write permission on.

Published repos

You can clone a public repo through git protocol with:

git clone git://host/repo_owner/repo_name

Public repositories are visible to anyone with network access to the daemon.

Tips

Ad-hoc SSH config

You can add host and key to ~/.ssh/config for simpler SSH/Git commands. For example:

Host gitkiss gk
	HostName yourhost
	User gitkiss
	IdentitiesOnly yes
	IdentityFile /path/to/private/key

will let you use commands like ssh gk instead of ssh -i key gitkiss@host and avoid exporting GIT_SSH_COMMAND in Git commands, e.g.:

git clone gk:repo_owner/repo_name

See manual page ssh_config(5) for more info.

Aliases

Add aliases within your shell to avoid writing long commands, e.g. alias repo="ssh gitkiss repo"

Features

the help commands tells a user what commands they can run
admins can manage users with the user command
the owner can manage admins with the admin command
all users can manage their repos with the repo command, including creating new repos, publishing them to gitkiss-daemon, setting permissions (r,rw) for other users and so on
all users can manage their public keys with the key command

Configuration

You may configure some aspects of the server by tweaking the file GK_PATH/conf.sh, which by default resides in /srv/gitkiss/gitkiss/conf.sh. The file is sourced by the GitKiss shell (so watch out to not break anything) and every customizable variable follows a brief description.

You can add custom shell commands by simpling adding an executable command file in commands/. For example:

printf "#!/bin/sh\nclear" > commands/clear
chmod +x commands/clear

Docker

You can build your own GitKiss Docker image by downloading the Dockerfile and building it:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sgorblex/GitKiss/master/Dockerfile
docker build --build-arg OWNER=ownername --build-arg PUBKEY=path/of/key/.pub --rm -t gitkiss:latest .

This will build a Docker image of GitKiss with default settings (system user gitkiss). You can then run it with:

docker run gitkiss

Contribute

I like clean code! Make a pull request if you think some part can be better written (which is very possible) or if you think you have a killer feature upstream should have. Of course, filing GitHub issues is a big help too.

Code etiquette

write POSIX compatible code (this includes using printf over echo in most cases)
write with safe double quoting ([ "$1" = "hello" ] over [ $1 = "hello" ])

License

GPL v.3