Gitolite is an ssh-based gatekeeper providing access control for a server that hosts many git repositories. without gitolite, each developer needing to push to one of the repositories hosted would need a user account on that server; gitolite lets you do that just using ssh public keys tied to a single, common, user that hosts all the repositories.

gitolite can restrict who can read (clone/fetch) from or write (push) to a repository, and who can push to what branch or tag - an important issue in corporate environments. other features include:
* access control by branch-name or by modified file/directory;
* per-developer "personal namespace" prefixes;
* simple but powerful configuration file syntax (with validation);
* config files (and authority for maintaining them) can be split;
* easy integration with gitweb;
* comprehensive logging;
* easy migration from gitosis.