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Alec the Geek
Alec the Geek

Reputation: 2030

What file permissions should the contents of $GIT_DIR have?

I have restored a git repo from backup and it does not have the correct file permissions. Is it enough to set owner +rw on all files and directories in .git, or is it more subtle?

Is there a utility to check or reset .git file permissions?

Upvotes: 21

Views: 7246

Answers (2)

Serious Angel
Serious Angel

Reputation: 1555

In addition to @Jonathan Leffler's answer, it's worth to mention the ownership of the .git and its parent directories, too. For example:

sudo chown -v "$( id -u; ):$( id -g; )" .;
sudo chown -v "$( id -u; ):$( id -g; )" -R .git;
find '.git' -type d -exec chmod -v 775 {} \;;
find '.git/objects' -type f -exec chmod -v 444 {} \;;
find '.git/hooks' -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec chmod -v 775 {} \;;
find '.git' -type f ! -path '.git/objects/*' ! -path '.git/hooks/*' -exec chmod -v 664 {} \;;

Related:
ensure_valid_ownership()
https://stackoverflow.com/a/74209644/5113030 (git submodule update failed with 'fatal: detected dubious ownership in repository at'...)

Upvotes: 1

Jonathan Leffler
Jonathan Leffler

Reputation: 753455

Directories should have 755 permission; files should have 644 permission.

That's a pretty good rule of thumb unless you expect members of your group to make changes to your repository.

Having said that, in one of my repositories, the files under .git/objects/* have 444 (readonly) permission for everyone. Other files are 644 as suggested.

This script, run in the top-level directory just above the .git repository would fix the permissions:

 find .git -type d | xargs chmod 755
 find .git/objects -type f | xargs chmod 444
 find .git -type f | grep -v /objects/ | xargs chmod 644

I started with -print0 for the first two find commands and xargs -0 to allow for the remote possibility of spaces in file names. But the grep -v in the third command would be difficult to manage with the -print0 format - so I omitted the space-safe notation from all the commands, knowing that git does not create files with spacing in names under the .git directory.

Upvotes: 36

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