Adventures with gitolite

It’s always fun when you only use a technology occasionally.

Adding a couple of new public keys to my gitolite repository, I had trouble accessing my repos. It turns out that gitolite actually does something quite clever when you name the public keys, allowing users to specify either plain usernames, or an email address.

My naming format was:

  • <name>@<tag>.pub -> <name>
  • eg, micha@foo.pub -> micha

What I didn’t realise was that if the <tag> contained periods (dots), then instead, the following happens:

  • <name>@<tag_part1>.<tag_part2>.pub -> <name>@<tag_part1>.<tag_part2>
  • eg. micha@foo.bar.pub -> micha@foo.bar

Much gnashing of teeth and ripping of hair later, I can finally access my repositories from my new machine.

NB: Repository URL is ssh://git@git.<server>.com/<repo path>.git