- There are times where you may want to host

your remote Git repository within your network.

The reasons for this are varied.

Perhaps you'll be storing sensitive data

which you don't want to trust to a cloud provider,

or maybe you want the speed advantage

of having your Git server on your local network.

I recommend setting up your own private Git repository.

This way you don't have to worry about

what is being stored in your repository

as your repository is private,

nor do you have to worry about storage

as local storage is large and cheap.

To do this properly, we need two hosts.

I will set this up on my rhhost2 VM

and have the rhhost1 client contacted through the network.

However, this will also work just fine on one host.

It's just not we'd build it in a real environment.

To run it on one host,

we'll just have the client host

contact itself over the network.

To create a remote Git repository easily

we'll be using SSH keys,

which means you'll probably want a Git repository

on an operating system that has an SSH server

such as Linux, Unix, or macOS.

Although it can also work on Windows using Win32_OpenSSH.

Go to the host with a remote repository will reside,

for me, this is rhhost2.

If you plan on doing this exercise on one host,

just follow along as these instructions will work

for that scenario as well.

Let's start by creating a Git user.

Type in sudo useradd git

and hit enter.

Type in your password if prompted.

Now let's give the Git user a password.

Type in sudo passwd git

and hit enter.

Now give the Git user a password.

Now make a directory for the Git repository.

We'll call it GitProjectTwo.git

and place it /srv/git.

Where you put this is not that important,

as long as the git user has access to it.

Type in sudo mkdir -p /srv/git/GitprojectTwo.git

Make sure you use the -p option

so it creates the parent directories.

Notice that I've used the .git naming convention

for this directory.

This is to tell me that this is a remote repository

being served at two other hosts.

We will not see the into this directory and do commits.

Now, change into the GitProject2.git directory by typing in

cd /srv/git/GitProjectTwo.git

and hit enter.

Now we'll initialize a bare Git repository.

Type in sudo git init --bare and hit enter.

That's the basic Git server setup.

Now let's set permissions,

cd up two levels by typing in cd /srv and hit enter.

And we'll change the ownership of the Git directory

to the Git user and the Git group.

Type in sudo chown -R git.git git

and hit enter.

All files should now be owned

by the Git user and the Git group.

Let's verify.

Type in ls -lR git

and hit enter.

And we can see that they are.

Before we move to the client,

we need to know the IP address of this host.

Type in clear, and then type in ifconfig, and hit enter.

My IP address is 192.168.1.125.

Even if you're using one host for this exercise,

you'll still need to know the IP address,

as you'll still be using it.

Now let's move over to the client host.

In my case, this is rhhost1.

Again, if you're doing this on one host, that's fine,

we'll just have our client contact our server,

which happens to be the same host with same IP address.

Let's create a new local project called GitProjectTwo.

Type in mkdir -p ~/RemoteRepos/GitProjectTwo

and hit enter.

Notice that I didn't include the .git portion of the name.

This tells me this is a Git project directory

that I'll cd into and make commits

The naming convention is actually up to you.

Now change into it,

type in cd ~/RemoteRepos/GitProjectTwo/

and hit enter.

And we'll initialize the repository

by typing git init

Now let's copy a few files to it.

Type in cp /etc/passwd /etc/hosts /etc/resolv.cof .

Make sure you add the . at the end.

This has to copy these files to the current directory

which is the GitProjectTwo directory.

If you're using an OS without these files

choose some other files to copy.

Now, hit enter.

Now stage the files for a commit.

Type in git add .

the dot matches all files in the directory.

Go ahead and hit enter.

Now we'll commit them with

git commit -m "Initial Commit"

and hit enter.

Now let's add our Git server as a remote.

For me this would be

git remote add origin git@

and then my IP address of my rhhost2 VM

192.168.1.125

You want to use your IP address here,

:/srv/git/git/GitProjectTwo.git

now press enter.

Now verify with git remote -v

and hit enter.

We can see that we have one remote host

for fetching and pushing to.

Now let's push our files to the remote.

git push origin master

and hit enter.

Say yes to accept the fingerprint

and now type in the Git user's password and hit enter.

If successful, you'll see it in the message on the screen.

Now other hosts can clone this repository

by tipping and get clone followed by the same URL.

Again, adjust the IP address to match your host.

Now, what we want to do is use SSH keys for authentication.

Once this is done, you can commit and push

to the remote repository without being bothered

with typing in a password,

you will want to be on your Git client.

I'm logged into my rhhost1 VM.

To use SSH keys for authentication,

we need to create our key pairs on our client

and then copy the public key to the Git server.

On your client, type in

ssh -keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "

and then your email address.

Be sure to use your email address here.

Also, if you plan on using these keys for GitHub

make sure the email address will match.

Now, hit enter.

It will ask us the name of the file to save the keys as,

you can take the default here.

For the passphrase, leave it blank and hit enter twice.

We can view the key pair by listing the .ssh directory.

To have an ls ~/.ssh and hit enter

We can see that we have an id_rsa key,

that's our private key and an id_rsa.pub,

which is our public key.

Now using the ssh-copy-id command

we can copy the public key to the Git server.

Type in clear, type in ssh-copy-id git@

and your get server IP address.

In my case, it's 192.168.1.125

You want to make sure you use your IP address here

and hit enter.

It will prompt you for the Git password

on the get server type that in and hit enter.

If successful, it'll say Number of key(s) added: 1,

it'll also say to test it.

Type in ssh git@ and your IP address.

which you see on the screen.

Let's go ahead and do that.

Type in ssh git@

in my case, it's 192.168.1.125

and hit enter.

And if it's a successful, you can log in

without a password which I did.

Once you've done this, type in exit.

Note, you can do this manually and append this public key