Corporate Git

July 5th, 2011

Contents

Intro
Credits
Prepare Windows
Set up Cygwin
Set up the OpenSSH server – sshd
Set up the OpenSSH client – ssh and ssh-agent
Git over ssh
The big picture
Politics
git Cheat Sheet
MKS vs git

Intro

In the original spirit of the subogero linux blog, this page is aimed to be a comprehensive guide for relative Newbies to set up git servers in a (corporate) network on Windows XP boxes. After reading this, you will be pushing and pulling among each other at a rate that will baffle both your managers and your IT department.

Large corporations tend to force developers to use a) Windows, b) a centralized version control system. Life under these circumstances is miserable. To make it bearable, one needs a Unix and a cool distributed version control tool. Fortunately you can turn your Windows machine into a Unix by using Cygwin (GNU/Windows), which comes with git, the Daddy of Distribution from His Majesty Linus Torvalds himself.

Listening to the Grand Master’s speech, pushing and pulling between each other seems to be the most trivial thing on earth. Once I tried this with a slightly remote server (pun intended) using the Samba protocol. It was incredibly slow. Git only shines on the local machine. With the SMB protocol, it’s the local git that accesses the remote server ten thousand times. That’s why git’s preferred protocol is ssh: behind the scenes, you run git on the remote box as well, and the two old gits reduce network traffic to the necessary minimum.

That’s what these pages are all about: setting up ssh and git on Windows XP.

Credits

Richard Stallman – the creator of GNU
Cygwin – the GNU/Windows people
Linus Torvalds – the creator of Git
OpenBSD – the creators of OpenSSH
Nicholas Fong – a compehensive Cygwin and OpenSSH setup page
Ovidiu Predescu – ssh-agent setup on Cygwin
Tim Lucas – how to setup a new remote git repo

  1. No comments yet.
Comments are closed.