gitolite: ‘foo’ does not appear to be a git repository – ForceCommand
Many people seem to get the following error message when trying to manipulate a remote git/-olite repository:
fatal: 'foo' does not appear to be a git repository
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
The problem here, which is absolutely not explained by the above error message, is likely to be that the remote command gitolite specifies in "~/.ssh/authorized_keys" is not used.
This can in turn be caused by two things, as far as I know:
- You are using an ssh key which appears in the authorized_keys file without gitolite's "command=..." configuration, in which case the solution is to use a separate public/private key pair for git
- Your SSH server has a ForceCommand directive in sshd_config (/etc/ssh/sshd_config on debian) which overrides the "command=..." setting in authorized_keys. To solve this, that directive has to go, or an exception needs to be added for your git user with a Match clause in sshd_config.
In the latter case, there does not seem to be any sane way to retrieve the contents of the "command=..." statement. While the user supplied command is available in the environment variable $SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND while using ForceCommand, the command supplied by authorized_keys seems nowhere to be found. Thus you need an exception for the ForceCommand directive. If you find another way to avoid this, please leave a comment below?