Adding a repository, as described in the previous section, will create an empty, bare, repository on the server. You can then populate that repository by pushing whatever content you like. This is certainly one way to bring existing content under Gitolite's control, as long as those repositories did not have their own Git hooks in place earlier.

However, most sites will have several existing repositories that need to be brought under Gitolite's control, and the technique of creating an empty repository and pushing content from a workstation can be really slow, especially if the content is already available on the server. This section will tell you how to do this quickly and easily.

First, make sure the existing repositories you are looking at are bare repositories. A bare Git repository is a repository that does not have a working...