Personal Git Server on the Raspberry Pi

Do you want a Git repository to share your work among your computers but you don’t want to rely on third-party services? You are lucky, it’s super-easy, all you need is a Raspberry Pi or a linux computer.

Tip: want to get started with Git? Check out my introduction to Git on Windows, it’s super-easy.

Setup

Connect your Raspberry Pi to your network and find it’s address. I will use raspberrypi in this tutorial, as it’s the default hostname in Raspbian.

If you don’t have a Raspberry Pi you can follow this tutorial on any Debian or Ubuntu computer, all the steps match exactly.

Note: you don’t really need to setup your own server to use Git, there’s plenty of free Git hosts. Try with GitHub (currently the most popular, in 2020), BitBucket or GitLab (currently my favourite).

You must create the git user and add public keys from your development machines.

# Acquire superuser privileges
sudo su

# Create the "git" user
adduser git

Create your authorized keys list with nano /home/git/.ssh/authorized_keys.

It should look something like the following in the end: one key per-line. You can also share a single key between all your development machines, even though this is discouraged.

ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaCAAAADAQAAABA/Long+Sequence+HereAAR6bmLNSGiWK9B git@raspberrypi
ssh-rsa AAAAB3c2uTF4V1ERAAAAR6bmLNSGi/Another+Key+HereAAAGiWKyc2E9B git@raspberrypi

Tip: if you need help creating a key pair, check out my guide to generate your own RSA key pair. Use your private key to authenticate when connecting from the development machine and copy your public key in the file above.

Creating a New Repository

Every time you want to create a new repository you can run the following commands from the server’s console:

# Impersonate the "git" user
sudo su git

# Create a new repository
git init --bare ~/myrepository.git

From your development machine, you can clone your repository and use it as usual.

git clone git@raspberrypi:myrepository.git

Feel free to leave a comment below if you have any question. And thanks for reading!