How to serve GIT through HTTP via NGINX with user/password?

Here is a full configuration for Git over HTTP, with TLS encryption, Basic Auth, and GitWeb. I assume that the repositories' root is in /home/git. You should replace example.com with your domain.

# Remove this block if you don't want TLS
server {
    listen 80;
    server_name git.example.com;
    return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}

server {
    listen       443 ssl; # Replace 443 ssl by 80 if you don't want TLS
    server_name  git.example.com;
    root         /usr/share/gitweb; # Remove if you don't want Gitweb

    error_log  /home/git/nginx-error.log;
    access_log /home/git/nginx-access.log;

    # Remove ssl_* lines if you don't want TLS
    ssl_certificate           /etc/letsencrypt/live/git.example.com/fullchain.pem;
    ssl_certificate_key       /etc/letsencrypt/live/git.example.com/privkey.pem;
    ssl_protocols             TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3;
    ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
    ssl_ciphers               'EECDH+AESGCM:EDH+AESGCM:AES256+EECDH:AES256+EDH';

    # Remove auth_* if you don't want HTTP Basic Auth
    auth_basic "example Git";
    auth_basic_user_file /etc/nginx/.htpasswd;

    # static repo files for cloning over https
    location ~ ^.*\.git/objects/([0-9a-f]+/[0-9a-f]+|pack/pack-[0-9a-f]+.(pack|idx))$ {
        root /home/git/;
    }

    # requests that need to go to git-http-backend
    location ~ ^.*\.git/(HEAD|info/refs|objects/info/.*|git-(upload|receive)-pack)$ {
        root /home/git/;

        fastcgi_pass  unix:/var/run/fcgiwrap.socket;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME   /usr/lib/git-core/git-http-backend;
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO         $uri;
        fastcgi_param GIT_PROJECT_ROOT  $document_root;
        fastcgi_param GIT_HTTP_EXPORT_ALL "";
        fastcgi_param REMOTE_USER $remote_user;
        include fastcgi_params;
    }

    # Remove all conf beyond if you don't want Gitweb
    try_files $uri @gitweb;
    location @gitweb {
        fastcgi_pass  unix:/var/run/fcgiwrap.socket;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME   /usr/share/gitweb/gitweb.cgi;
        fastcgi_param PATH_INFO         $uri;
        fastcgi_param GITWEB_CONFIG     /etc/gitweb.conf;
        include fastcgi_params;
   }
}

You have to install Git, Gitweb and FastCgiWrap :

sudo apt-get install git gitweb fcgiwrap

For TLS, I use Let's Encrypt free certificates.

sudo letsencrypt certonly -d git.example.com --rsa-key-size 4096

To access Gitweb, just browse to git.example.com. You will also need to configure it to set the repositories' root :

sudo vim /etc/gitweb.conf

In order to get HTTP Basic Auth, you have to use the htpasswd command to add users to /etc/nginx/.htpasswd:

sudo apt-get install apache2-utils
sudo htpasswd -c /etc/nginx/.htpasswd username

Remove the -c switch the next time you run the command, because it only creates the file (Nginx doesn't have a .htpasswd file by default in its configuration directory).

If you want something more complex, powerful, GitHub-like, check Gitlab.

Take a look at the following article, http://www.toofishes.net/blog/git-smart-http-transport-nginx/

It provides a sample nginx config:

http {
    ...
    server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  git.mydomain.com;

        location ~ /git(/.*) {
            # fcgiwrap is set up to listen on this host:port
            fastcgi_pass  localhost:9001;
            include       fastcgi_params;
            fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME     /usr/lib/git-core/git-http-backend;
            # export all repositories under GIT_PROJECT_ROOT
            fastcgi_param GIT_HTTP_EXPORT_ALL "";
            fastcgi_param GIT_PROJECT_ROOT    /srv/git;
            fastcgi_param PATH_INFO           $1;
        }
    }
}

What this does is pass your repo which is located after /git in the url, to /usr/lib/git-core/git-http-backend. Example, http://git.mydomain.com/git/someapp would point to the someapp repository. This repo would be located in /srv/git/someapp as defined in the fastcgi_param of GIT_PROJECT_ROOT and can be changed to fit your server.

This is very useful and you can apply HttpAuthBasicModule to nginx to password protect your repo's access via HTTP.

Edit: If you are missing git-http-backend, you can install the git-core package on Ubuntu/Debian or on RPM based platforms look at How can git be installed on CENTOS 5.5?