If you use any kind of version control software, there’s a decent chance that
it’s Git. And if you use Git, there’s a very strong chance that you host your
repositories with a publicly accessible code forge, be that GitHub, GitLab, or
even the original. But what happens when you want a
different remote? Perhaps you use something like
hledger to track your finances and don’t want to send
semi-sensitive data to a cloud service, private or otherwise. Or maybe you’re
aiming to implement backups and don’t want to rely on mirroring to a different
public service. You could go with self-hosted versions of forges like GitLab or
SourceHut, but these all involve a significant time investment in setup and
maintenance. If all you care about is git push and git pull, you probably
already have what you need to spin up a simple Git server.
All it takes is another machine with an SSH server and a key pair. That’s it.
There are two main setup flows that should feel familiar.
To add a new repository to the remote, first create a bare repo in the desired location on the remote host:
$ mkdir <repo name>
$ cd <repo name>
$ git init --bare
Then add the new remote on your development host and push branches you care about (probably main):
$ git remote add <remote name> <ssh user>@<remote host>:<repo path>
$ git checkout <branch>
$ git push -u <remote name> <branch>
Use the same remote URL scheme to clone a repository onto a new development host:
$ git clone <ssh user>@<remote host>:<repo path>
This simplest setup will work fine for single-user scenarios. For sharing with multiple users,
you’ll likely want to create a dedicated unprivileged git user.