• Go to the Control Panel > Advanced Mode > Terminal & SNMP.
• Click the Enable SSH Service option under the Terminal tab. Change your default SSH port, if desired.

NOTE: Synology restricts SSH/Telnet connections to members of the Administrators group on any particular Synology device. If you don’t already have a git-access-specific user with administrator privileges, it is a good time to create one. From here on out, if I need to refer to this specific user, I will do so with <git-username>. Just replace <git-username> with your user when following these instructions.

• Go to the Control Panel > User section and create the <git-username> user.
• Add this new user to the Administrators group. Depending on your repository location, you may need to add Read/Write permissions for the root part of the NAS filesystem inside /volume1.
• Go to the Main Menu > Git Server and click the Allow Access check box for <git-username>.

NOTE: From here on out, I will be using the command line (and connecting via SSH instead of the Synology browser-based front end). In order to follow along, you will need the IP address for your Synology NAS on the network. I will refer to that IP as <nas-address> where necessary. Just replace <nas-address> with your server’s IP address when following these instructions. If you are using a Windows machine, you may need a terminal emulator to continue.

On the NAS server, log in as admin and configure SSH to streamline repository access in the future. If you get an error about the “homes” directory not existing (or something similar):

$ ssh admin@<nas-address>
$ sudo -i

$ cd /volume1/homes/<git-username>/
$ mkdir .ssh

• On the local machine, copy your public key to the newly-made .ssh folder on the NAS:

1$ scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub admin@<nas-address>:/volume1/homes/<git-username>/.ssh

• Back on the NAS server, use the public key you transferred over to act as the lone authorized user in the <git-username> profile and set file permissions accordingly:

$ ssh admin@<nas-address>
$ sudo -i

$ cd /volume1/homes/<git-username>/.ssh
$ mv id_rsa.pub authorized_keys

$ cd /volume1/homes/
$ chown -R <git-username>:administrators <git-username>/.ssh
$ chmod 750 <git-username>
$ chmod 700 <git-username>/.ssh
$ chmod 600 <git-username>/.ssh/authorized_keys

Creating a Repository

Following along with the assumption that the <git-username> user will access git repositories either in /volume1/root/ or just /volume1/ itself, we need to actually initialize the repository now. I am assuming /volume1/git/<dummy-name.git> is the target repository; make changes to the target path or repository name as required. You will have to do this step for every individual repository that is hosted on the server.

$ # SSH into the NAS server as <git-username>
$ ssh <git-username>@<nas-address>

$ # Navigate to your prospective repository location and initialize a new, shared repository
$ mkdir /volume1/git
$ cd /volume1/git
$ git init --bare --shared <dummy-name.git>

$ # It also may be a good idea to open up the permissions for the git repository, just in case
$ chmod -R 766 <dummy-name.git>

$ # Finally, update the pack information for the git service running on the NAS
$ cd <dummy-name.git>
$ git update-server-info

Cloning a Repository

Try this command in a folder on your local machine:

$ git clone ssh://<git-username>@<nas-address>/volume1/git/<dummy-name.git>

You can now push to and pull from the remote repository on your local server!