Obscure git issue: git push hangs silently on un-writeable repos

Making this blog post as a note mostly to myself; but since I couldn't find a posted solution elsewhere, this might also help someone else encountering a 'git push hangs' issue...

Situation: Recently installed Gogs (https://gogs.io), an awesome github-style self-hosted web service, written in Go. I have a bunch of repos already in /var/git/, and didn't want to move them (or make it appear they hadn't moved) to preserve the ability to use go get (see this post about setting that up) and raw command-line git without changing the repo URIs everywhere they were already checked out on remote systems.

To put some of these repos under the purview of Gogs, yet keep them visible in /var/git/, I made soft symlinks in /var/git/, moving the actual repos in question to
/home/git/gogs-repositories/<user>/<repo>.git. By default, these will have permissions allowing git (and the Gogs web app) to manage the repo, eg:

drwxrwxr-x  6 git git 4096 Jun  8 20:48 go_login.git

However, since these were my legacy repos, for the above reasons the symlink at the location in /var/git/ is owned by another user and I didn't want the git user dedicated to Gogs owning things there, outside of the git user's home tree.

As it turns out, if the owner of the symlink in /var/git/ pointing to the moved repo within /home/git/gogs-repositories/ doesn't have write permissions to the repo, git push will just silently hang after one supplies ssh:// credentials.

Solution: Add the legacy user to group git, and add group write permissions to all repos linked to in this way in /home/git/gogs-repositories/ .

This was a head-scratcher, since git-daemon writes nothing to /var/log/daemon.log indicating an issue, at least on my setup -- perhaps git-daemon can be made to be more verbose?

-R.