How to grant read/write to specific user in any existent or future subdirectory of a given directory?

create a group myrepousers for example, and add your git users to that group.

Then change the group of everything under /path/to/git/myrepo to myrepousers:

chown -R .myrepousers /path/to/git/myrepo

Then fix the permissions:

chmod -R g+w /path/to/git/myrepo
find /path/to/git/myrepo -type d -exec chmod -R {} g+s \;

Should be all set.

Actually that was the wrong approach. After additionnal researches, I found out that in my case I have to user git's buildin features to handle filesystem's right in the repository.

It's basically done with the shared option of git init, which can have (among other) the following values:

• group: initialize the repository so that files and directories have user and group write access, and everybody else has read access
• 0660: same but without read access for the others.

The newly created directories and files automatically have the right permissions. You can also use git init on an existing repository to reconfigure it without loosing it's content.

So in the end what I had to do:

• Create a group mygitrepo
• Add users to it
• chmod -R the git repository to root:mygitrepo

And now every users of the group can pull / push, and nobody else can, and that without messing with the file system rights.

git init --bare --shared=0660

http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-init.html for more information.

If ACLs are supported, you can do it with default ACLs. Beware that it's easy to forget about those as they don't show up when you do an ls -l.

find /path/to/git/myrepo -type d -exec setfacl -m d:u:john:rwx {} +

But, I suspect you may want to do something a bit more organised. Deploying gitolite may provide a better solution.