Your own private git remote

I have some documents (writing, financial data, some code) that I want to keep private. This describes how to setup a git remote repository on your home network, and to back it up to the cloud (daily) with tarsnap.

Definitions:

office

The host that holds your remote git repo.

lap

The computer where you do your programming.

Here are the steps:

1. Create a git-private user on office. On OpenBSD, that is
   adduser git-private
2. Create ssh key-pair on lap
   

   mark@lap:~$ ssh-keygen
   Generating public/private rsa key pair.
   Enter file in which to save the key (/home/mark/.ssh/id_rsa): /home/mark/.ssh/id_rsa_git-private
   Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): 
   Enter same passphrase again: 
   Your identification has been saved in /home/mark/.ssh/id_rsa_git-private.
   Your public key has been saved in /home/mark/.ssh/id_rsa_git-private.pub.
   The key fingerprint is:
   cc:c7:c8:ab:36:9b:1a:d1:61:d1:2f:9a:06:4b:97:16 mark@lap
   The key's randomart image is:
   +--[ RSA 2048]----+
   |      ..         |
   |      E..        |
   |      oo .       |
   |    oo+=.o.      |
   |   ..=.oS.o      |
   |    ..+  o       |
   |    ..  .        |
   |     .oo         |
   |    .o+o         |
   +-----------------+
   mark@lap:~$
   

3. Authorize key.
   scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa_git-private.pub git-private@office:~/.ssh/authorized_keys
4. On lap, associate private key with office
   

   cat >> ~/.ssh/config
   Host            office
    Hostname office
    IdentityFile    ~/.ssh/id_rsa_git-private
    User            git-private
   ^D
   

5. Set up bare remote git repo on office.
   

   mark@lap:~$ ssh git-private@office
   git-private@office:~$ git init --bare myrepo.git
   

6. On lap, add remove repo as remote.
   

   mark@lap:~$ git remove -v
   mark@lap:~$ git remote add origin git-private@prod:/home/git-private/myrepo.git
   mark@lap:~$ git push -u origin all
   

7. To securely backup encrypted versions of your remove, see my Recipe for setting up backups with tarsnap (OpenBSD 5.7).