The previous chapter showed you how to set up what we might call a sandbox installation of Gitolite, suitable for experimenting with the software and getting comfortable with it. We did that using a script that hid most of the details of the install process so that you could get to the good stuff.

In this chapter, we will actually perform a proper install of Gitolite. We will start with the prerequisites on the server and move on to the actual install steps. By the end of this chapter, you should have a working installation of Gitolite that is ready to support users and serve up repositories to them securely, enforcing access restrictions as you specify them.