A remote repository is generally a bare repository — a Git repository that has no working directory. Because the repository is only used as a collaboration point,
there is no reason to have a snapshot checked out on disk; it’s just the Git data.
In the simplest terms, a bare repository is the contents of your project’s .git directory and nothing else.
The SSH Protocol
To clone a Git repository over SSH, one can use the shorter scp-like syntax for the SSH protocol:
git clone user@server:/full/path/to/project.git
Getting Git on a Server
In order to initially set up any Git server, one has to export an existing repository into a new bare repository - a repository that dosen’t
contain a working directory. (Make sure its already a git repository, if not, use git init, git add filenames etc.) By convention, bare repository directories end in .git, like so:
git clone --bare my_project my_project.git
One should now have a copy of the Git directory data in my_project.git directory. It takes the Git repository by itself, without
a working directory, and creates a directory specifically for it alone.
Putting the Bare Repository on a Server
Now that you have a bare copy of your repository, all you need to do is put it on a server and set up your protocols.
Let’s say you’ve set up a server called git.example.com that you have SSH access to, and you want to store all your Git repositories
under the /srv/git directory. You can set up your new repository by copying your bare repository over:
scp -r my_project.git user@git.example.com:/srv/git
At this point, other users who have SSH access to the same server which has read-access to the /srv/git directory can clone your repository
by running
git clone user@git.example.com:/srv/git/my_project.git
But, it may still be an empty repository, commit and push from your local directory my_project may needed. Specifically, for the first time, they are
git remote add origin user@git.example.com:/srv/git/my_project.git #set new remote repository URL
git remote -v #verifies the new remote URL
git remote --help # for more help
git push origin master #pushes the changes in your local repository up to the remote repository you specified as origin
If a user SSHs into a server and has write access to the /srv/git/my_project.git directory, they will also automatically have push access.
Git will automatically add groupe write permissions to a repository properly if you run the git init command with --shared option.
ssh user@git.example.com
cd /srv/git/my_project.git
git init --bare --shared
It’s important to note that this is literally all you need to do to run a useful Git server to which several people have access — just add SSH-able accounts on a server, and stick a bare repository somewhere that all those users have read and write access to. You’re ready to go — nothing else needed.