How to make a git repository read-only?

Git Problem Overview

I have some git repositories accessed remotely through SSH and I want to make some of them read-only to prevent more pushes. Some people have remotes pointing to these repositories.

These bare repositories were initialised --shared=group, so is setting file permissions to 660 for all files good enough to still allow SSH access, but disallow writes? Or is there an easier way?

Cheers.

Git Solutions

Solution 1 - Git

There is more than one possible way to do this.

If your users each have a shell account (perhaps limited), and each of them accessing git repositories via their own account, you can use filesystem permissions to control SSH access to git repositories. On Unix those would be write permissions on directories, perhaps with the help of creating a group and specific permissions for a group (with "sticky group ID" set).
Pushing requires git-receive-pack to be in $PATH of user, and be executable for them... although I am not sure how feasible this approach would be.
You can use update or pre-receive hook to do access control to repository, for example using [update-paranoid][] example hook from contrib/hooks in git sources.
With larger number of users you could be better with using a tool to manage access to git repositories, like Gitosis (in Python, requires setuptools) or Gitolite (in Perl).
For read only access you can setup [git daemon][git-daemon] to provide read-only anonymous (and unauthenticated) access via git:// protocol, instead of access via SSH protocol.

See documentation for url.<base>.insteadOf config variable for a way to ease the transition from SSH to GIT protocol.

See also Chapter 4. "Git on the Server" of Pro Git book by Scott Chacon (CC-BY-NC-SA licensed).

[update-paranoid]: http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=blob;f=contrib/hooks/update-paranoid;hb=HEAD "git.kernel.org - git/git.git/blob - contrib/hooks/update-paranoid"

[git-daemon]: http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-daemon.html "git-daemon(1) Manual Page - A really simple server for git repositories"

Solution 2 - Git

A pre-receive hook that simply prints an informative message and exits with a non zero status does the job.

Assuming you put some meaningful information in your message, it also cuts down on the queries from frustrated users asking why they can't push:

#!/bin/bash
echo "=================================================="
echo "This repository is no longer available for pushes."
echo "Please visit blah blah yadda yadda ...."
echo "=================================================="
exit 1

Remember to set the executable permission for the script and to make sure is owned by the right user and/or group, or else it will not execute and will not give any warning.

Solution 3 - Git

chmod -R a-w /path/to/repo.git

Solution 4 - Git

Since git relies primarily on the filesystem for access control, that will work. Note that in your permissions, the world has no access to the file, but the user and group have read/write access. If you want world-readable, your permissions should be 0444.

You could do further fine-grained control by setting the repo permissions as 0664 where the user is nobody and the group is something like gitdevs. Then, only people in the gitdevs group will have the ability to write to the repo, but the world can read from it.

Follow-up Here is a link that covers various ways to share your repo and covers come pro's & cons and access control features.

Solution 5 - Git

Inspired by this comment:

Update your hooks/pre-receive file with the following content:

 #!/bin/sh
 
 echo "Closed for all pushes" ; exit 1

This way, all users trying to push changes to this repo will receive the message above and the push will be rejected.

Solution 6 - Git

If you need access control as well, check out gitosis. Pretty easy to set-up and you can use a simple script to control who can do what.

Solution 7 - Git

Another possibility is the git protocol, but it requires the git daemon to be running.

Solution 8 - Git

Recently I used limiting access to path "/repo.git/git-receive-pack" to achive result that the repository is read-write for some users and read-only for some others. In httpd config it looks like this:

    <Location /repo.git/>
            Require group developers developers-ro
    </Location>

    <Location /repo.git/git-receive-pack>
            Require group developers
    </Location>

Solution 9 - Git

As I am just a user of our GitLab (and I didn't wanted to bother the admins in the first step), I searched for another way and found one:

Open the GitLab webinterface and go to the repository you want to set to read-only
Choose Settings > Repository
Expand Protected Branches
Add the master branch and set Allowed to merge and Allowed to push to No one
If the master branch is protected already, you can set these values in the list below

Solution 10 - Git

FWIW, if you're trying to make a Github repo read-only, you can archive it: https://docs.github.com/en/github/creating-cloning-and-archiving-repositories/archiving-a-github-repository/about-archiving-repositories

Content Type	Original Author	Original Content on Stackoverflow
Question	Steve Folly	View Question on Stackoverflow
Solution 1 - Git	Jakub Narębski	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 2 - Git	Dale Anderson	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 3 - Git	Pat Notz	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 4 - Git	jheddings	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 5 - Git	Per Lundberg	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 6 - Git	Makis	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 7 - Git	Ikke	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 8 - Git	keypress	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 9 - Git	Nicolas	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 10 - Git	Steve K	View Answer on Stackoverflow