Thanks for the replies everyone!
Disclaimer: I'm not at all familiar with git server setup. Would it make sense to change git user home directory to be the required dedicated directory?
I did think about this but that doesn't really solve the problem. The reason I'd like to use a dedicated directory for the repositories is so that I can separate the repos from the git user's home files (e.g. .profile, .ssh, etc.) I am also hosting an HTTP front end that reads the repos and I don't want to introduce a security risk by giving the web server access to the git user's home directory.
Yeah, that's what I would suggest. git-shell does explicitly cd to $HOME, so any chdir you do before then will be lost (though you could perhaps just set $HOME in ~/.ssh/rc).
I did try ~/.ssh/rc, but when using git-shell it says `/bin/sh .ssh/rc: Unknown command` or something to that effect. I'm assuming this has to do with the fact that git-shell can only run a certain subset of commands (although according to the SSH docs, the rc file _should_ be executed _before_ switching to the user's $SHELL, so I'm not actually quite sure why this doesn't work).
And I second the notion of gitolite for a dedicated setup like this (I haven't really used it much myself, but the design always seemed quite sane to me).
I'd actually never heard of gitolite before. It does look like a great piece of software, but I'm worried it might be overkill for me since I'm running just a single-user setup (i.e. me).
For now, I've just created symlinks from /srv/git into /home/git which allows cloning over SSH to work how I'd expect. I also created a interactive command under git-shell-commands/ that will create a new repository in /srv/git and also automatically generate the symlinks into /home/git. It feels a bit hacky, but it works!
