Take the 2-minute tour ×

Following this tutorial on installing git, gitolite, git-daemon, and git-web I have successfully completed the entire tutorial and actually added projects gitolite; they show up on git web when I go to http://servername/.

Now I'm trying to clone gitolite-admin.git to add another project and it spits out the error

fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

I can't actually clone any repositories from my server. Here is a bit of info, although I'm not exactly sure what to provide:

  1. I can SSH to the server using SSH keys.

  2. The gitolite SSH key is working; when I execute the git clone gitolite@{server_ip}:gitolite-admin.git it asks me to enter in the passphrase for the key, which does work.

  3. sudo su gitolite while on the server allows me to cd into /home/gitolite where the repositories folder and the projects.list is held.

  4. ls in /home/gitolite/repositories shows gitolite-admin.git as well as the others.

  5. projects.list does not list gitolite-admin.git however it does list otherproject.git; if this were affecting the ability to clone, i would assume that it would still work to clone otherproject.git, which it does not.

If there is anything else I can provide to give more insight please let me know. Any help is appreciated.

Note: I followed the tutorial very closely and only strayed from their configuration at the sudo apt-get install gitolite step which is not available on Ubuntu 10.04 so I followed this article for the actual installation of gitolite.

share|improve this question
serverfault.com/questions/270688/…. Please give us the content of ~/.ssh/authorized_keys? –  quanta Aug 1 '11 at 7:03
Write the rest of the "git clone gitolite@..." command that you use to initialize cloning. –  Goran Jurić Aug 1 '11 at 19:08
I'll have to post the authorized_keys file tomorrow morning; I'll check out that question as well. –  user29600 Aug 3 '11 at 4:32
So you can't clone ANY repositories? –  Brian Aug 4 '11 at 1:25
No, none of them work. –  user29600 Aug 4 '11 at 4:09
add comment

2 Answers

up vote 0 down vote accepted

I ended up redoing the entire installation using the installation instructions on the sitaramc.github.com website; worked first try using the root method.

Added new users following the instructions in the administration documentation.

Works from multiple client computers.

TIL; check the creator's documentation before looking for outsider tutorials.

As another note to people who may be having troubles with this... one of the errors I came across after reinstalling using the instructions above was that 'gitolite-admin' does not appear to be a git repository this ended up being because I was executing:

sudo git clone git@{SERVER_IP}:gitolite-admin

rather than

git clone git@{SERVER_IP}:gitolite-admin

which ended up using the root user to try to access the repo rather than the current user, which was already authenticated.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Can you verify the value of $projectroot in /etc/gitweb.conf? It sounds like it should be /home/gitolite/repositories compared to /var/lib/gitolite/repositories in the tutorial.

What do you see when you go to http://servername/? The project list?

What about if you go directly to http://servername/gitolite-admin.git?

share|improve this answer
servername shows the project list but does not show gitolite-admin.git. The server is local so I can't check servername/gitolite-admin.git right now, I'll post back later. –  user29600 Aug 4 '11 at 4:09
add comment

Your Answer


