I have successfully created a few wikis with this in the past (on 15-12-2011 to be exact), but now this seems impossible. All I get is this error:

root@marcos:~# env LANG=C ikisite  --verbose create rococo.anarcat.ath.cx --admin https://id.koumbit.net/anarcat
useradd a-rococo --create-home --skel /dev/null
git config --global user.name admin
fatal: failed to stat '.': Permission denied
error: git failed

Ah - it turns out that you can't run this command from a private directory (like /root) as ikiwiki calls git config --global user.name admin without changing directory first. git, in turn, does a stat(".") for some obscure reason, and fails miserably:

[pid   597] getcwd("/root", 4096)       = 6
[pid   597] stat(".", 0x7fffdc602e60)   = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
[pid   597] write(2, "fatal: failed to stat '.': Permi"..., 45fatal: failed to stat '.': Permission denied
) = 45

A simple workaround: cd /tmp before running the command.

So this should be fairly simple to fix: just change the directory first. It's is probably safe to chdir($HOME) anyways... --anarcat

I did exactly that so patch in the dev/usercreate_fails branch of git repo (git://src.anarc.at/ikiwiki-hosting). --anarcat

This looks good, but incomplete: calling ikiwiki -setup also fails. Try my ready/home branch, which includes anarcat's, instead? http://git.pseudorandom.co.uk/smcv/ikiwiki-hosting.git/shortlog/refs/heads/ready/home --smcv

merged --Joey