Basic installation

To setup a gitea server using docker, the following docker-compose.yml file shall be used:

What the above docker-compose configuration will do is that it will, in essence, create two, always on, services, that will forever be restarted: a mariadb database server that will write all of its data to a local "db" directory, and another web service that will server as the main git server and the web server alongside it.

Before starting the docker services, please create the necessary resources first.

Create the required local directories to store the data in

Do a simple command to create the necessary directories:

mkdir data db
Backing up just these two directories should, in theory, be enough to allow for full restoration of all git repository resources into the future. WARNING: This has not been tested yet!!!

Create a separate git user to login into via SSH

Creating a separate user, technically, is unnecessary, but it makes the configuration more conventional.

Assuming the 1002 UID is already assigned to a different user, feel free to use a different UID (be sure to update the yaml configuration with the proper user ID, then).

Once this configuration has been done, go ahead and generate an /home/git/.ssh/ directory for the user to have. Be sure to chown this specific directory to the git user as appropriate:

Once all these steps are done, you can proceed to the next step.

Spin up a container from the docker image

Had all the necessary steps been done properly, this should yield a fully functional container. If there are any errors encountered by this point, please fix them before proceeding.

Set up a proper nginx endpoint for the docker service

Deploy the following configuration to make the container accessible to the outside world:

Once this is done, restart nginx:

Confirm that the web page is accessible at the git.transistor.one URL. In case it's not, fix it.

# Customize Gitea configuration #

Assuming you do need to change a couple of settings, gitea will have generated a configuration file at ./data/gitea/conf/app.ini.

Make whatever changes you need to make in this file.

The changes will take effect only after stopping and restarting the container, though.

Notable changes that are worth mentioning is setting up an SMTP endpoint:

And, of course, the server hostname configuration:

Oh and, almost forgot, disable user registrations by setting

If you need more configuration information, check this out.

Activating SSH passthrough

This is the most complex step out of all of them. In order to take advantage of the fact that SSH git pulls/pushes will be done via standard port 22, normal SSH traffic needs to be differentiated from git specific SSH traffic.

To this end, multiple configurations will need to be done.

This one's extremely important. Failing to perform this step will make SSH git pulls and pushes require to be done directly from the 2200 port like so

While this isn't the end of the world, ideally, all SSH traffic should be routed to port 22, as is standard. VPS firewalls or intermediary ISPs may, themselves, block off incoming or outgoing traffic to unconventional ports, which can cause issues. As such, using the standard port 22 for SSH communication would be ideal.

Enable SSH login for the git user

So, to enable SSH capabilities to the git user, please edit the "/etc/ssh/sshd_config" configuration and change the following line:

Obviously the "alex" user doesn't need to be here. The git user does. Change this list as best suits your needs. Don't forget to restart the service after you're done:

Generate a proper public/private keypair for all the accounts that need to use git via SSH with

This part's pretty self explanatory.

For each user, on each device, that will require SSH git access to the aforementioned git server, they will need to have their own public/private authentication keypair set under a Gitea user that's already registered on the Gitea web portal.