Provide remote access to git repositories through SSH and protection via key pairs.

git-access solves a very specific set of problems. If you need:

• To host git repositories for others
• Make git clone available over SSH
• Restrict who can clone repositories with SSH public keys

then git-access is for you!

Note: git-access requires OpenSSL 6.2 or later as it takes advantage of the AuthorizedKeysCommand and AuthorizedKeysCommandUser options added in that version.

Running git clone over SSH is a two step process. First, SSH needs to confirm that the incoming public key is allowed to access the box, and second the application in question needs to confirm that the user in question has access to the requested repository. git-access encompases both steps in one binary.

git-access has two modes of operation: Authorization and Access.

The authorization step is when the user's SSH keys are checked against the known list of keys from the application. git-access must be configured with a URL from which the list of valid SSH keys will be returned. The response must be a JSON array of objects containing two keys: user and keys. This request must also return all users and their SSH keys as the selection and authorization logic is handled inside of SSH itself.

• user :: String :: Unique identifier the application gives user accounts
• keys :: Array :: An array of public keys for that user

[
  {"user": "1", "keys": ["ssh-rsa AAA...==", "ssh-rsa AAB..=="]},
  {"user": "2", "keys": ["ssh-rsa AAD...=="]},
]

The options supported in this mode are:

git-access \
  --authorized-keys         # Enable Authorization mode. Also available as "-A"
  --authorized-keys-url=    # Full URL that returns SSH keys in the format above
  --authorize-command=      # Path to binary for initiating the actual git access
                            # This will default to the current `git-access` binary
                            # but for reasons stated below may be better to be explicit here.

Once SSH authorization completes, it is time to ensure the current user has access to the repository in question. This consists of a second HTTP request which is expected to return with a status code of 2xx for success and >= 400 for failure or denied. This request will receive two parameters: user and repository, where user will match the identifier returned from Authorization and repository will be pulled from the original git clone request. E.g. for git clone [email protected]:my-site/blog.git, repository will equal "my-site/blog.git".

The options supported in this mode are:

git-access \
  --user=                  # The unique user identifier, usually provided from Authorization
  --permission-check-url=  # The URL which will check if the user has access or not.

git-access also supports the following flags regardless of execution mode:

git-access \
  --syslog                 # Enable logging to a local syslog daemon. Will log under info as "git-access".

The following is the recommended way of configuring git-access on servers. The AuthorizedKeysCommand works best when it is given a single binary file to run, thus it is recommended to set up shell scripts that call out to git-access with the required parameters. You'll need two of these such scripts:

This script will call out to get the list of known keys and will look something like:

#!/bin/sh

/path/to/git-access -A --authorized-keys-url=http:https://your.app.com/git_access/keys --authorize-command=/path/to/confirm-git-access.sh

Once SSH keys are confirmed, checking repository access permissions and forwarding along the original git request are the second script. The get-authorized-keys.sh command will inject --user into this script depending on what came back from the server during authorization.

#!/bin/sh

/path/to/git-access "$@" --permission-check-url=http:https://your.app.com/git_access/access

Then, to tie all of the above together, configure SSH itself to run the first script.

Note: The script called by AuthorizedKeysCommand must be owned by root and must be writable only by root, or SSH will not execute the script. Also this requires PubkeyAuthentication to be turned on.

Match User git
  AuthorizedKeysCommand /path/to/get-authorized-keys.sh
  AuthorizedKeysCommandUser git

Restart SSH to apply the new configuration and enjoy!

git-access is managed and built with gb so you'll need that installed first.

After cloning this repository, you can build git-access with gb build.

Due to the nature of the system, the tests are high level that set up actual web servers and check that the full communication process works. As such, the easiest way I know to do this is through Ruby, so the tests require Ruby 2.0 or greater. Run tests with rake.

git-access is open source and contributions are encouraged! No contribution is too small.

Please see the contribution guidelines for more information.