Retaining file permissions with Git

The git-cache-meta mentioned in SO question "git - how to recover the file permissions git thinks the file should be?" (and the git FAQ) is the more staightforward approach.

The idea is to store in a .git_cache_meta file the permissions of the files and directories.
It is a separate file not versioned directly in the Git repo.

That is why the usage for it is:

$ git bundle create mybundle.bdl master; git-cache-meta --store
$ scp mybundle.bdl .git_cache_meta machine2: 
#then on machine2:
$ git init; git pull mybundle.bdl master; git-cache-meta --apply

So you:

• bundle your repo and save the associated file permissions.
• copy those two files on the remote server
• restore the repo there, and apply the permission

Git is Version Control System, created for software development, so from the whole set of modes and permissions it stores only executable bit (for ordinary files) and symlink bit. If you want to store full permissions, you need third party tool, like git-cache-meta (mentioned by VonC), or Metastore (used by etckeeper). Or you can use IsiSetup, which IIRC uses git as backend.

See Interfaces, frontends, and tools page on Git Wiki.