> you basically install git-daemon, which allows you to run a central git server AFAIK, git-daemon is to allow the specific use case of anonymous, public acces

> you basically install git-daemon, which allows you to run a central git server AFAIK, git-daemon is to allow the specific use case of anonymous, public access to git repositories [1]. You don't need it to have a "central git server", though: If you have an ssh account on yourhost.com and a git repo in /home/you/yourproject on that machine, you can simply git clone git+ssh://yourhost.com/home/you/yourproject. Give out multiple ssh keys to that account, and it's a minimal but functional "central git server"! Of course, doing the above the easiest, quickest way, with a single UNIX user account, results in (A) giving git client users access to a shell and (B) giving git client users read/write access to each others' repos. Gitolite uses authorized_keys restrictions to avoid (A) and a clever SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND hack to avoid (B). > doubt it is gitolite Gitlab in fact did use Gitolite for actually serving the git client until quite recently. The largest change in 5.0 was reimplementing a subset of Gitolite's functionality and losing the dependency [2]; the project's major version number is still at 5, although 6.0 is promised soon [3]. [1] http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-on-the-Server-Git-Daemon http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-on-the-Server-Git-Daemon [2] http://blog.gitlab.org/gitlab-5-dot-0-has-been-released/ http://blog.gitlab.org/gitlab-5-dot-0-has-been-released/ [3] http://blog.gitlab.org/gitlab-5-dot-4-released/ http://blog.gitlab.org/gitlab-5-dot-4-released/