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Hosting Git repositories through WebDAV on Snow Leopard Server

This will be quick and dirty; the necessity comes from a particular source code that I can't trust to host online to a third party vendor/provider.

I have a Snow Leopard Server, so I will make use of the tools provided, there's little information about the subject, so here it is.

Also I choose WebDAV since my SSH is blinded to the outside world, in order to access it I require a VPN connection, but since I want to share some repo to the outside world, WebDAV comes handy.

I host my repositories in a subdomain, so before anything, open up your DNS Server Admin section and start editing by adding your new shiny hostname as you please by adding a new record there.
I assume you are using a subdomain along the lines of repositories.yourdomain.com; you don't have to do this step if using an ip address, this is up to you.

Login into your server through ssh or the way you like and create a repositories index directory somewhere.
In my particular setup I have this structure for my websites:

/Sites/kain/mydomain.com/[www, macruby, etc]

So go where you like and create a directory, I'll use repositories

mkdir /Sites/kain/mydomain.com/repositories

Assign this directory to the _www user

chown -R _www:_www /Sites/kain/mydomain.com/repositories
cd /Sites/kain/mydomain.com/repositories

Start creating a new directory that will host the git repository:

mkdir myproject.git

After that go in the Web section, and create (or copy) a new website.

Relevant General setup:
Host name: repositories.yourdomain.com
Web folder: /Sites/kain/mydomain.com/repositories

Relevant Options setup:
Folder listing: enabled (not really necessary but useful for testing what you see in index later)
WebDAV: enabled
Rest disabled

Relevant Realm setup:
create a new realm by clicking the plus sign
Realm name: myproject
Authentication: Basic (will try Digest/Kerberos in future)
Select Location for the select widget instead of Folder and write

/myproject.git

In the right section now add your users that will have access, after that change their permissions.
Since my repos are private I only keep the users that have write access there by setting their permissions to Browse and Read/Write WebDAV, None for Everyone.

Relevant Logging setup:
enable logging as you please

Relevant Security setup:
I choose to use SSL for this tutorial, so you are going to use a certificate and port 443.

Save and close Server Admin.

Let's go back to our SSH server session.
Enter your project directory and exec those commands:

cd /Sites/kain/mydomain.com/repositories/myproject.git
sudo git init --bare
sudo chown -R _www:_www .
sudo mv hooks/post-update.sample hooks/post-update
sudo git update-server-info

Now switch to your client.

Edit your ~/.netrc file with those informations:

machine repositories.mydomain.com
login myusername
password mypassword

Enter your project dir and exec those commands:

cd myproject
git config --global http.sslVerify false # If you don't own a valid SSL certificate on your server, skip --global to enable this option only for this project
git init # gitify the directory
git add . # add files to git repo
git commit -m "hi" # first commit
git remote add origin https://repositories.mydomain.com/myproject.git/ # end slash is important
git push origin master --force -v

Now edit this file, always in your project root dir:

mate .git/config

And add

[branch "master"]
	 remote = origin
	 merge = refs/heads/master

This way you can do git push and git pull normally.

Done.

Related posts:

1. Snow Leopard server FAQs, part 1
2. Installing MySQL Ruby Gem in Snow Leopard Server