fatal: Unable to create temporary file '/home/username/git/myrepo.git/./objects/pack/tmp_pack_XXXXXX': Permission denied

It sounds like you have file in the git repo owned by root. Since you're ssh'ing in as 'username' to do the push, the files must be writable by username. The easiest thing is probably to create the repo as the user, and use the same user to do your pushes. Another option is to create a group, make everything writable by the group, and make your user a member of that group.

Ok, I figured it out. The issue was that I didn't have the correct permissions set for myrepo.git and the parent directory git.

As root I logged into the server and used:

$ chown username /home/username/git

This then returns drwxrwxr-x 4 username root 4096 2012-10-30 15:51 /home/username/git with the following:

$ ls -ld /home/username/git

I then make a new directory for myrepo.git inside git:

$ mkdir myrepo.git
$ ls -ld myrepo.git/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2012-10-30 18:41 myrepo.git/

but it has the user set to root, so I change it to username the same way as before.

$ chown username myrepo.git/
$ ls -ld myrepo.git/
drwxr-xr-x 2 username root 4096 2012-10-30 18:41 myrepo.git/

I then sign out of root and sign into server as username:

Inside git directory:

$ cd myrepo.git/
$ git --bare init
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/username/git/myrepo.git/

On local machine:

$ git remote add origin      
ssh://[email protected]/home/username/git/myrepo.git
$ git push origin master

SUCCESS!

Hopefully this comes in handy for anyone else that runs into the same issue in the future!

Resources

• http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/unix-or-linux-commands-for-changing-user-rights.html
• http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-use-chmod-and-chown-command/

It would seem like your user doesn't have permission to write to that directory on the server. Please make sure that the permissions are correct. The user will need write permissions on that directory.