Ssh – Create SSH user with limited privileges to only use Git repository

You should definitely be able to get this running under a non-system user. Pick/create a user to run Hudson then try connecting to the server using ssh user@host. If it asks for a password it isn't finding you key obviously.

In that case, double check that the key is loaded into pageant (you need to get pageant to load the relevant key from disk every time it starts), and that the GIT_SSH environment variable is set.

One other way you could do this is set your GIT_SSH environment variable to include a reference to the key. I currently do this with tunnelier and SV, so eg my SVN_SSH variable is "sexec -pk=1" where sexec is tunnelier's ssh CLI and -pk=1 tells it to use my private key in slot 1.

That is the main difference between a centralised VCS (like CVS) and a DVCS (Distributed): you always clone all the content of a repo, even though you can perform a shallow clone, as Olipro mentions.

• In a CVCS, you can put everything, and get bacj only a subset of it.
• In a DVCS, you consider a repo as a global and coherent set of files, that you always manipulate as a all.

Doing a shallow clone of just one branch is possible, but complicated: See "Partial clone with Git and Mercurial".

But I recommend not using Git as a release management / deployment tool: "How to shallow clone a single branch in git?".

I would rather go with git archive to zip the right branch/version you need, and then copy that to the appropriate server.