You should be running the web server as a user other than root. Lets assume 'www'. You develop on another machine, and push to a shared repo where the live server also pulls from. However, you will probably log into the server as root or yourself instead of www, yet if you work with files, use git, etc… permissions can get messed up, even if you tell git to ignore permissions in the config file.

• git config core.sharedRepository group
• –or– if you are initializing one from scratch, you can do git init –shared=group

I personally disable filemode checks by git since I work across Unix, Mac, and Windows environments. Rather, I set up group sticky bits and umask 2.

• git config core.filemode false

• chgrp -R <whatever group> gitrepo
• chmod -R g+swX gitrepo

• change the umask for all users to 002 (many machines have the default as 022)

• make an alias when using root so git='su -m webuser -c git'
• add post-update hooks to set permissions everywhere
  • chmod -R g+rw . 2>/dev/null
• learn more about ACL on unix machines which go beyond the typical rwx stuff
  • http://www.udel.edu/it/help/unix/groupsharing.html

• http://serverfault.com/questions/26954/how-do-i-share-a-git-repository-with-multiple-users-on-a-machine
• http://joemaller.com/2008/11/25/a-web-focused-git-workflow/
• http://danielmiessler.com/blog/using-git-to-maintain-your-website