Gitosis requires password even though the public key is given

An empty repository was created because that's just how git works: it has to init a repo before it can start pulling remote objects into it. Unfortunately this means you'll have to manually delete the empty repo before you try cloning again.

As for why the clone failed, it looks like you're using the wrong syntax for the remote repository path; git clone doesn't use scp syntax. In fact, if you don't specify a clone protocol, I believe it assumes the git protocol rather than ssh, which would probably be why it asked you for a password. Try this instead:

$ git clone ssh://gitosis@host/~/gitosis-admin.git

I also faced the same problem "fatal: '/gitosis-admin.git' does not appear to be a valid repository."I searched a lot for the problem and finally found the solution.

Actually, the default address of gitosis user is "/srv/gitosis" : As in case of my setup having ubuntu server 10.04.

And when we write "git clone gitosis@server.com:gitosis-admin.git", it searches for gitosis-admin.git repository in /srv/gitosis. So when I entered inside the /srv/gitosis, I found out that there is another repository inside it named as repositories which consists of the gitosis-admin.git repository.

So actually by default the gitosis-admin.git was not in the default location. So I have to modify the command path and then it worked fine.

I got the repository cloned onto my local machine. I used the command as:

"git clone gitosis@server.com:repositories/gitosis-admin.git" and it worked fine for me.

See for the gitosis-admin directory in your case and I hope you will be able to solve your problem.

This is what solved the problem for me (on Ubuntu):

git clone gitosis@ns.home:/srv/gitosis/repositories/gitosis-admin.git