Git over HTTP with Apache

Sun, Feb 19, 2017

I had a requirement at work recently for our Git repo to be reachable via HTTP. I looked at Gitlab however came to the conclusion that it was probably overkill for our situation. I went with the following setup instead which can be run on the most minimal VM e.g AWS EC2 Nano instance.

The instructions were intended for Centos7 however should work without much modification for other distros.

Install required packages:

yum install httpd git mod_ssl

Ensure that ‘mod_cgid’ + ‘mod_alias’ are loaded in your Apache config
Append the following config to /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf to force SSL by redirecting non-SSL to SSL:

<VirtualHost *:80>
	ServerName gitweb.example.com
	Redirect permanent / https://gitweb.example.com/
</VirtualHost>

Modify /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf and add this to the default vhost:

SetEnv GIT_PROJECT_ROOT /data/git
SetEnv GIT_HTTP_EXPORT_ALL
ScriptAlias /git/ /usr/libexec/git-core/git-http-backend/

<LocationMatch "^/git/">
        Options +ExecCGI
        AuthType Basic
        AuthName "git repository"
        AuthUserFile /data/git/htpasswd.git
        Require valid-user
</LocationMatch>

Create git repo and give Apache rw permissions:

mkdir /data/git
cd /data/git; git init --bare myrepo
mv myrepo/hooks/post-update.sample myrepo/hooks/post-update
chown apache:apache /data/git -R

File post-update should now contain:

#!/bin/sh
exec git update-server-info

Create htpasswd file to protect repo:

htpasswd -c /data/git/htpasswd.git dev

Update SELinux to allow Apache rw access to repos:

semanage fcontext -a -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t "/data/git(/.*)?"
restorecon -v /data -R

Start Apache:

systemctl start httpd
systemctl enable httpd

Push to the repo from your client as follows:

git push https://gitweb.example.com/git/myrepo -f --mirror

Pull from repo to your client as follows:

git pull https://dev@gitweb.example.com/git/myrepo master