Home Git Server
The hardware
A few years back, when Covid was all around, my brother was in need of a PC so that he would be able to attend the now online classes at his school (believe it or not, he didn’t need a PC up until then, so he just didn’t buy one).
So he buys a cheap refurbished Lenovo Thinkcentre PC with an SSD of 256 GB and a mediocre proccesor and calls it a day.
Fast forward to today and that PC is collecting dust in the attic. So I get on the web and research what could I do with old hardware. Most of the answers were about Home Servers, and as I play sometimes with all sorts of programming deeds I thougth a local Git server would be of great service, as sometimes I am just too lazy to setup a private Github repo and push my code to it. Also, it is objectively cool to own a git server, period.
The setup
I decided to use Ubuntu Server for my OS and the installation was quick and painless, and after an half an hour I was running a Ubuntu on my server. The next step was to create a new user called ‘git’, as the official guide told me.
Then I created a bare repository using the newly created ‘git’ user and I all needed next was to create a SSH server so that people can access this repo.
An importan step was creating authentification keys, used to better secure the server but also for a more easy access.
All you have to do is create a ~/.ssh/authorized_keys directory on the server and then add the individual key of every PC you want to have access to the server. Generating a kew is also quite easy, just run ssh-keygen -o in the terminal then copy the contents of cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
A great video that helped me it this one.
And there you have it, the minimum of a git home server is done. Now users can clone,commit and push their code to the server.
T.