So we finally migrated successfully from gitosis to gitolite. I'll try to explain how to do it easily.

Client side, part 1:

1. Update your local gitosis-admin repository

Server side, part 1:

1. Disable write access to your gitroot by either changing the "git" users homedir (I prefer this method) or by renaming the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. This is important to ensure gitolite gets a clean authorized_keys file
2. Make a backup of your gitroot by using rsync, tar or whatever else..
3. Cleanup/Remove your old gitroot
4. Install gitolite
5. Copy the example gitolite.rc into the git users homedir (e.g. ~/.gitolite.rc) and set your settings (Don't forget to chown/chmod it later)
6. Run "gl-setup /path/to/your/pubkey" as "git" user

Client side, part 2:

1. git clone git+ssh://git.yourdomain.tld/gitolite-admin.git
2. Grab my convert.pl script
3. cd /path/to/gitosis-admin
4. perl ~/convert.pl [/path/to/your/gitosis.conf] >> /path/to/gitolite.conf
5. Commit & Push your changes but DON'T add your old keys from keydir yet!

All repositories will be created after your push, ignore the pubkey warnings for now.

Server side, part 2 (Run commands as user "git"):

1. Create a tmp directory and cd into it
2. git clone -q --bare /path/to/your/gitroot/backup/repository.git
3. cd repository.git
4. GL_BYPASS_UPDATE_HOOK=1 git push -q --mirror /path/to/the/new/gitroot/repository.git

With clone and push --mirror we ensure that we don't keep any old hooks or other stuff from gitosis.

In most cases it might be enough to simply remove the old hooks e.g. by running "find /path/to/gitroot/ -type d -name hooks -exec rm -f {}/* \;", then you could skip the server part 2 and use your old gitroot instead.

I did part 2 to ensure we really have a clean new gitroot. So decide yourself.

If you need to push via ssh, create a migration user in gitolite.conf

repo @all     RW+ = migration

and add the public key as well.

Then start a ssh-agent and ssh-add your public key. Now you don't need to enter the passphrase for each push.

If you have a lot of repositories then just write a small shell script including the git clone/push stuff.

Once you're done: Remove the migration user and its key.

Now add all your old gitosis keys to gitolite. That's it!

If you need the post-update hook from git (update-git-server-info) then just link it into your ~/.gitolite/hooks/common dir.

ln -s /usr/share/git-core/templates/hooks/post-update.sample ~/.gitolite/hooks/common/post-update

Run gl-setup again (as user "git") and you're done.

Each time when you modify your .gitolite.rc, add/change hooks or update gitolite itself then simply run gl-setup. NOTE: Old hooks will not be removed by gitolite/gl-setup!

Gentoo user can choose between the upstream/vanilla version dev-vcs/gitolite or our own fork dev-vcs/gitolite-gentoo.