Strictly speaking, Gitolite doesn't know where users come from. If you recall the section on authentication and authorization from the previous chapter, you learned that Gitolite does not even do authentication—it leaves it up to the ssh server (or perhaps the HTTP server). However, Gitolite does help with ssh-based authentication, since that is the most common use of Gitolite, and the server and its configuration are fairly standard and predictable, in most cases.

A word of warning: do not add new users manually on the server. Gitolite users, repositories, and access rules are maintained by making changes to a special repository called gitolite-admin and pushing those changes to the server, as explained in Chapter 2, Installing Gitolite. Thus, almost everything you do will be within a clone of the gitolite-admin repository.

To add a user, say Alice, obtain her public key (typically $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub on her workstation). Then copy it to the directory called keydir (in your...