This covers setting up a SSH access controlled Git server from scratch. It's assuming there is no other repository to import from. It is loosely based on the instructions from Chapter 4 of the Pro Git book.

Installing Git is simple. You might also want to grab gitk for visualizing your commits and branches, and kdiff3 for merging changes.

yum install git gitk kdiff3

Initial setup might include configuring your name, and editor. "----global" means that the configuration will be stored under ~/.gitconfig.

git config --global user.name "John Doe"
git config --global user.email johndoe@example.com

git config --global core.editor emacs

git config --global merge.tool kdiff3

Create an empty repository, and clone it into a "bare" repository. Actually, I'm not sure if the first step is strictly necessary, since the "clone" is "init" + "fetch".

You might also want to create a root level directory, or alternatively a symbolic link from root, e.g. /git. This will make it easy to reference when cloning and working from remote computers.

mkdir /tmp/git_empty
git init /tmp/git_empty

mkdir /git
cd /git
git clone --bare /tmp/git_empty test.git

Now you can clone (the still empty) repository by the following. Notice the optional port number, if you have SSH running on a different port than the default 22. Notice also, since the port argument is specified, ssh protocol has to be prefixed explicitly.

git clone ssh://johndoe@example.com:2222/git/test.git

Finally, after adding, changing and committing to the new local clone, these changes can be "pushed" back to the server. Conversely, the updates on the server can be "pulled".

git push origin master

git pull