What file permissions should the contents of $GIT_DIR have?

Question

I have restored a git repo from backup and it does not have the correct file permissions. Is it enough to set owner +rw on all files and directories in .git, or is it more subtle?

Is there a utility to check or reset .git file permissions?

Answer 1

Directories should have 755 permission; files should have 644 permission.

That's a pretty good rule of thumb unless you expect members of your group to make changes to your repository.

Having said that, in one of my repositories, the files under .git/objects/* have 444 (readonly) permission for everyone. Other files are 644 as suggested.

This script, run in the top-level directory just above the .git repository would fix the permissions:

 find .git -type d | xargs chmod 755
 find .git/objects -type f | xargs chmod 444
 find .git -type f | grep -v /objects/ | xargs chmod 644

I started with -print0 for the first two find commands and xargs -0 to allow for the remote possibility of spaces in file names. But the grep -v in the third command would be difficult to manage with the -print0 format - so I omitted the space-safe notation from all the commands, knowing that git does not create files with spacing in names under the .git directory.