I've been using SVN at work, but we've never been able to fully take cleanly integrate branching & merging as I'd like so with that, and the desire to allow remote developers to have a fully distributed VCS I thought I'd take a look at git.

I setup git and gitolite on a CentOS 6.3 server that we'll call nix2 and added a single repository with some content.

On my local workstation (Macbook Pro OSX 10.8) I was able to git clone git@nix2.domain.com:admin.domain.com which I understand is the same as a svn checkout. I then added a files, committed and did a git push

All good so far, then I ssh'd to my server nix2 and tried to 'checkout' this content in my /www/htdocs/ directory only to have the remote server tell me it isn't a git repository...

So I went back to my Macbook, deleted the folder and re-did a git clone to test and it worked fine..

No matter what I tried, I was unable to do a git clone on the remote server itself. This is trivial in svn, you juts create the dir and do a svn co svn+ssh://server/var/svn-repos/repo/trunk .

I've tried doing the git clone on the server itself as the following users root, git, jukas all with the same results. When I check /var/log/secure it just shows a ssh connection opening and closing.

I thought maybe this was a RTFM situation, but in reading the process seems pretty straightforward so I'm stumped what I'm doing wrong.

Any insight is much appreciated.

I'm not sure to understand the question completely but

maybe git uses a different syntax on OSX.

The syntaxt I'd use on Linux would be

if "admin.domain.com" is the full name of your git repo

I tried a git clone and was told it couldn't find the repo . I ended up fixing it, which I'll explain how later, but let me briefly explain my setup more clearly.

I have a CentOS server called nix2.domain.com. On that server in /www/htdocs/admin.domain.com I have existing content I wanted to manage via git (I'm used to SVN) but also access on my macbook as well as let a handfull of other developers have access to. Because the code is commercial and devs have to sign a NDA, I can't use a public github repo and would rather host my own git remote server than pay a monthly fee. Normally I would setup SVN on nix2.domain.com add the repos and then check out the code on the desired machines.

So on nix2 I added a user called git and created /home/git/repos/admin.domain.com and did a git init --bare. I then tried to clone /www/htdocs/admin.domain.com to git@nix2.domain.com:/home/git/repos/admin.domain.com and was told it didn't appear to be a git repo.

This is the same issue I experience prior when I tried to use gitolite to create and manage repos.


Here's how I was able to workaround and fix it, but surely I should be able to add existing content to a repo, and then clone it to the 'master repo' that the remote server is hosting?

As user git I created /home/git/repos/admin.domain.com and did a git init --bare. Then on my laptop I did a git clone git@nix2.domain.com:./repos/admin.domain.com and checked out an empty repo. Next I fired up my ftp client and downloaded the content from nix2 /www/htdocs/admin.domain.com into the workingdir I just cloned. Then I did a git add . followed by a git commit and a git push origin master. Then I went to /www/htdocs/ and tarballed admin.domain.com and deleted it before doing a git clone git@nix2.domain.com:./repos/admin.domain.com .

Once I found that workaround I was able to properly clone it both in the /www/htdocs dir and in a working dir on my macbook and push / pull between the two, however this is rather cumbersome as some of the sites I need to manage via VCS are rather large with many nested subdirs which makes ftp'ing content down to my laptop a pain in the butt.

Surely there's an easier way to accomplish this? As an aside question, if I plan on managing less than 20 repos is there a compelling reason to use something like gitolite or gitosis?

Well I'm not very deep into the git stuff. I have some local repos in our local net which are public as they are not reachable from the outside and I use cgit as a webinterface for that.
So maybe I can't help you much, but I remember I had once always empty repos when I tried to clone them.
Actually this was a stupid file and folder rigths thing.

The git-deamon is running as user git and when I used git init even as userX it creates an empty repo owned by user "git".

But when I added files, they were owned by "userx" and git add + git commit didn't touch them as user "git" had no rigths ...
So actually I have to do before adding files (or chown later if you prefer).

Maybe it helps ...