Now that we've seen a couple of useful, and immediately usable, examples, it is time to look at the lexical syntax of the conf/gitolite.conf file (often called, in Gitolite, the conf file).

The conf file is a plain text file, whose overall syntax is governed by a few simple rules.

Gitolite usernames (in our example, alice, bob, and so on) must start with an alphanumeric character, and contain alphanumerics, periods, hyphens, underscores, or the @ sign. If an @ sign is present, it must be followed by a domain name (that is, something that has at least one period in it). This allows e-mail addresses to be used as usernames, which is arguably very useful when you have several John Smith in your organization!

Repository names must start with an alphanumeric character, and contain alphanumerics, periods, hyphens, underscores, or slashes. However, they must not start with a slash or end with a slash.

Comments are allowed; the syntax is the same as the shell, perl, and...