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EP.1 Setting Up Gitea and SSH Connections

·323 words·2 mins
alowhiter
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alowhiter
GiteaSetupTutorial - This article is part of a series.
Part 1: This Article

Getting Gitea
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Gitea is an open-source, self-hosted Git service.

Official download page: https://about.gitea.com/products/gitea/

Setup
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Gitea setup screen

To begin, I recommend using the default settings.

Note: After setup, you may need to change the SSH user setting in .\custom\conf\app.ini to git, or use the account name of the host running the service when connecting. Otherwise, SSH authentication may not work correctly in this setup.

Creating a Client SSH Key
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Generate a key with:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "[email protected]"

You will usually be asked whether to use the default path or specify a different path and filename. Press Enter to accept the default. The output looks roughly like this:

Generating public/private ed25519 key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (C:\Users\username/.ssh/id_ed25519):

Next, you can set a passphrase to encrypt the key. In this example, I leave it empty:

Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:

You should then have two files:

  • C:\Users\username/.ssh/id_ed25519
  • C:\Users\username/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

Configuring SSH Access
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Open C:\Users\username/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub. It contains a long line similar to:

ssh-ed25519 AAA...

Paste it into the location shown below, under your account settings:

Adding the public key

Next, use the temporary token to verify the SSH key:

The verification token

The command is approximately:

echo -n 'the-token' | ssh-keygen -Y sign -n gitea -f C:\Users\username/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
Tip: If you set a passphrase, enter it to generate the signature.

You will receive output like this:

-----BEGIN SSH SIGNATURE-----
...
-----END SSH SIGNATURE-----

Copy and paste the signature here:

Submitting the signature

You should now be able to connect to your repository over SSH:

Connecting to the repository

For example:

git clone ssh://gitea-ssh-user@your-domain:your-ssh-port/your-gitea-account/your-repo.git

Closing Thoughts
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This seemed so simple, but I was stuck on it for a long time. The main issue was that Gitea’s SSH user was not necessarily git. You can change it to git if your setup continues to work correctly with that change.

HTTP access is also an option instead of the SSH approach described here, using an appropriate authorization flow such as browser-based authorization.