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Over the weekend I went searching for a way to host remote git repositories on my Dreamhost (DH) account. I do a fair bit of development year round and up to this point have been hosting all my code on my DH account using Subverision. Over the past few weeks I’ve been making the move from Subversion to Git on my local dev machines, and figured it was time to start hosting my git repositories remotely as well.

It took a lot of searching around online and some tinkering, but I was able to get everything setup properly and in the hopes of saving everyone else some time, I’ll post my results here.

First, if you take a look at the DH wiki entry for Git, you will see the very first method described is to run Git on your DH account using WebDAV. If you’re like me, thinking about doing Git over WebDAV probably just left you scratching your head. I think the reason why this is advocated, is because of the way DH setups SSH accounts. By doing git over SSH to a DH account, only one person would be able to remotely push changes, which is fine for my needs. But, if you need to give multiple users access for pushes, then WebDAV would technically work for you. But, I opted not to go down this route.

I chose to simply compile Git locally into my DH account and connect to it over SSH. This blog post on Autopragmatic.com got me about 90% of the way toward completion, so the next few steps are taken directly from his post.

Step 1. Compile and Install Git on Dreamhost

The first thing that needs to be done is to compile Git locally into your DH account. I personally have a ~/src directory where I download and compile all my code and I have a ~/packages directory where I install my binaries. You may have a different setup so if so, just substitute those paths accordingly. Also, make sure to substitute <USER> with your DH username

$ cd ~/src
$ wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.5.4.rc4.tar.gz
$ tar xvzf git-1.5.4.rc4.tar.gz
$ cd git-1.5.4.rc.tar.gz
$ ./configure --prefix=/home/<USER>/packages NO_CURL=1 NO_MMAP=1
$ make
$ make install
$ git --version

There are a few things to be aware of. First, the NO_MMAP=1 parameter is necessary to keep the DH process police from killing your Git process. Git normally creates two 250MB memory map files, and DH will kill your Git process since it sees it consuming over 500MB of memory. I also used the NO_CURL=1 parameter as I will not be needing my git repositories to have the ability to pull from other remote locations. If you do need this functionality, then you will also need to download, compile and install libcurl, but that is beyond the scope of this post. Also, make sure that you have the path of your installed binaries in your $PATH or that last command of git –version will fail. In my case, I have added /home/<USER>/packages/bin to my $PATH in my ~/.bashrc file.

Step 2. Create a new bare Git repository

Now that you have installed git, you can start making new repositories. You can, of course, store these repositories anywhere you want. I chose to create a whole new sub-domain under the Dreamhost Domains Panel. Some people prefer to instead create a git subdirectory under an existing domain. Any way is fine, the choice is yours. For the rest of this post I’ll simply be refering to git.example.com as the <PATH> of my git repositories. You will change this to your path.

If you plan on making multiple repositories, the easiest thing to do is simply automate the process by adding the following function to your ~/.bashrc file.

newgit()
{
    if [ -z $1 ]; then
        echo "usage: $FUNCNAME project-name.git"
    else
        gitdir="/home/<USER>/<PATH>/$1"
        mkdir $gitdir
        pushd $gitdir
        git --bare init
        git --bare update-server-info
        chmod a+x hooks/post-update
        touch git-daemon-export-ok
        popd
    fi
}

This way you can simply login to your DH account and type:

$ newgit my-new-repos.git

and a new bare repository will be created for you in your <PATH>. Or if you prefer to create a new repository from your local box you could even do it over SSH:

$ ssh <USER>@<MACHINE>.dreamhost.com newgit my-new-repos.git

Step 3. Pull and push to your new repository

Theoretically, you should now be able to pull and push from this bare repository using the following command:

$ git clone ssh://<USER>@<MACHINE>.dreamhost.com/home/<USER>/<PATH>/repo-name.git
$ git push origin

However, I found this did not work for me and resulted in the following errors:

Initialized empty Git repository in ~/src/newrepo/.git/
Bad port ”
fatal: no matching remote head
fetch-pack from ’ssh://<USER>@<MACHINE>.dreamhost.com:/home/<USER>/<PATH>/my-new-repo.git’ failed.

The problem is that the new repository is bare and has absolutely no data in it at all. That led me on another search that brought me to this excellent writeup that got me the rest of the way home. What I did was simply changed directories into my local git repository. If you haven’t even started your codebase locally yet, I would recommend going ahead and doing that.

Create a new directory and create or add in your files, then do the following to setup a local git repos:

$ cd /my/code/path
$ git init
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "initial import"

That will create a local git repository in your working directory and commit the initial files. Next follow the next set of commands to add your DH repos as a remote and push your initial codebase up to it.

### assuming ssh://server/remote.git resolves to an empty, bare git repo
### and that we are chdir()'d to the local repository:
$ git push --all ssh://<USER>@<MACHINE>.dreamhost.com/home/<USER>/<PATH>/my-new-repos.git
$ git remote add origin ssh://<USER>@<MACHINE>.dreamhost.com/home/<USER>/<PATH>/my-new-repos.git
$ git config branch.master.remote origin
$ git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master
$ git fetch
$ git merge master
$ git branch -a
* master
  origin/master

Now you can simply work locally and do a

$ git push

to push to your DH remote. And if you ever need to you can simply execute a

$ git pull

to pull down and merge remote changes.