Setup Gitblit on windows server 2003

Git is by its nature friendly to *nix systems. So setting up a Git repository on Windows has been really painful: quite several tools need to be integrated, sophisticated steps need to be performed. In short, it's time consuming, error prone, and hard. I tried it once, and do not want to try it again.

Recently I read about (forgot the article, sorry) this new OS project, Gitblit, which really make hosting Git repository on Windows a easy task. It's a Java application, which means it runs on not only *nix, but also Windows! They provide several packages for different usage scenarios, and also good document.

The setup process is very easy:

• Download the "Gitblit Go" package, unzipped to the folder you plan to hold the software
• Go to the folder, edit the installService.cmd file and change the "SET ARCH= " line. My server is x86 based, while the default setting is amd86
• Edit the gitblit.properties, point git.repositoriesFolder to the folder where you hold your Git repositories. Note you should use forward slash even on Windows, e.g C:/GitRepo/. Change server.httpsBindInterface to empty to bind https to all ip addresses. By default it only binds to localhost, which will not allow other computers accessing it
• Run makekeystore.cmd to create a self-certified key for https
• Run installService.cmd to install it as a Windows service
• Start the service and launch browser to navigate to https://yourpcname:8443, and login with admin/admin
• Change the password of admin immediately.

And you are done!

You will want to examine the gitblit.properties for possible configurations. Most of the items are documented very well so for most items you can just read through the config file and config properly without searching through documents.