Gitolite allows a server to host many git repositories and provide access to many developers, without having to give them real userids on the server. The essential magic in doing this is ssh"s pubkey access and the authorized keys file, and the inspiration was an older program called gitosis. Gitolite can restrict who can read from or write to a repository. It can also restrict who can push to what branch or tag, which is very important in a corporate environment. Gitolite can be installed without requiring root permissions, and with no additional software than git itself and perl. It also has several other neat features described below and elsewhere in the doc/ directory.