update oct 22. 2009: This method also works in Centos 5.4. I’ll post the epel think below once they’re available

I setup git on a Centos 5.3 server the other day, accessible over ssh. Here are the steps I followed to get things up and running.

Centos’s yum repository does not have git in it, so setup fedoras epel (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repo.

i386:

    rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm

x86_64:

    rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm

As root run this command:

    yum install git

Next I’m going to setup a new repository and make it accessible over ssh:

    mdkir /home/username/repo #create directory for new repository

    cd /home/username/repo

    git init

We’ll create a dummy file to get started. If you trying to clone (checkout) an empty git repository, you’ll just get errors:

    touch firstfile

Add all files in this directory to your git repository:

    git add .

Commit the changes you’ve made to the repo:

    git commit

Next we’ll create a clone of the repo and configure it to be public:

    cd /home/username

    git clone --bare ./repo repo.git

    touch  repo.git/git-daemon-export-ok

you can copy your repo.git directory to where you want to make the repo public

Now we want to checkout a copy of the new repository from a different server.

    git clone ssh://yourserveraddress/home/username/repo.git

You should now have a new directory labeled repo which contains the file ‘firstfile’

To add a new file to the repo:

    cd repo

    touch secondfile

    git add .

    git commit

Now we want to submit the changes back to the git server:

    git push

You’ll be prompted for your password.

Enjoy.