CentOS 6 and Gitorious

At my work we use and I manage Team Foundation Server for our source control system. TFS has great application life-cycle management. Outside of work I use GitHub.com for project hosting. Git is a great source control system. GitHub provides a great service for those needing a remote repository.  TFS has its benefits. Git/GitHub has its own benefits. This post won’t degenerate into which is better or how you should avoid one and use the other. That said, I’m a big proponent of using the best tool when the situation dictates it.

Anyhow, recently I wanted to do some development at work that really didn’t have an end goal of going to production, etc. I was fleshing out some ideas and I needed a place to store them and possibly share them with some other coworkers. Since I really didn’t want to “pollute” our source control repository with something that likely would fall to the wayside and didn’t really need the support of builds, etc. I wanted to use Git (I like Git).

I first jumped to Bitnami to see if they had a turnkey solution. I picked Gitorious partially because I like their logo and after a cursory look over their public website it looked pretty neat. Long story short, I found that the Bitnami solution didn’t work for me. My goal was to actually make it easy to use git on our network. I tried valiantly to get it setup to use LDAP/Winbind in our AD environment. I had a bunch of little problems that just ended up being a headache. Most of the documentation for joining to an AD domain was intended as an end user of a desktop/laptop type environment.

After another Google search I decided to use CentOS to host Gitorious. While still a bit more of a task than I thought it was I was able to join the server to the domain and achieve AD authenticated logins. After some fiddling with Gitorious to get it to do LDAP authentication I was thrilled.

I have to say I’m really happy with Gitorious. There interface is great and after a small bit of a learning curve with using it with TortoiseGit I have a pretty good workflow. I’ve even converted a few of my fellow developers to use it for prototyping projects.

I suspect that many landing here will be looking for resources to configure CentOS 6 with a Windows domain controller. While I don’t have my own version of how to do this I can send you to two great links that contain the steps I used to get CentOS joined to our works AD domain:

• (Spiceworks) Setup CentOS to authenticate via Active Directory
• (Zwiegnet) Join CentOS to active directory domain 2008R2

I prefer the authconfig-tui method presented in the second link, although the Spiceworks link has a better explaination of the CLI commands to do the join.