Re: git-shell default working directory

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 12:29:13PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
> 
> > On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 10:10:05AM +0100, Andrei Rybak wrote:
> >
> >> > I've not yet found a way to get this to work without keeping the
> >> > repositories in the git user's home folder.
> >> 
> >> Disclaimer: I'm not at all familiar with git server setup. Would it make sense
> >> to change git user home directory to be the required dedicated directory?
> >
> > Yeah, that's what I would suggest. git-shell does explicitly cd to
> > $HOME, so any chdir you do before then will be lost (though you could
> > perhaps just set $HOME in ~/.ssh/rc).
> 
> I didn't suggest it because the original request did not sound like
> building a dedicated machine that is used only to push into without
> interactive shell access.  If $HOME is moved to such a git centric
> place, that would make it almost impossible to use the account for
> shell interactive access, I would imagine, and if that is acceptable,
> perhaps something like gitolite would fit the bill better?

I took the mention of /home/git to mean it was a dedicated "git" user.
But yeah, that would be an awful suggestion for a regular user. :)

And I second the notion of gitolite for a dedicated setup like this (I
haven't really used it much myself, but the design always seemed quite
sane to me).

I _do_ keep git repositories on a host accessible by my normal user.
It's a mild inconvenience to have to clone "git.peff.net:git/foo.git"
instead of just "git.peff.net:foo.git". We could allow a config or
environment variable to re-root a relative path given to upload-pack. As
long as it was clear this isn't a security feature (it's for people who
already have shell access, and could be overridden by an absolute path),
I think it would be OK.

-Peff