For a single author you don't necessarily need any server at all. A cloud directory or zip files work well.

But gitolite is so easy to setup & maintain, it's not a big difference and for r/w-access management within teams, it's priceless.

I guess one could even hack anonymous access with "PermitEmptyPasswords yes" and "AuthenticationMethods none"

No Gitolite requires keys.

Hence "hack". It needs keys for administration but at a first glance, I see no reason why a git-anon user couldn't be part of gitolite's git user.

You might need to use another user if you want to set its shell to `gitolite-shell username` (no command= for password authentication) but then you'd need to chain sudo or something to have Gitolite run under its own user again... Seems very tricky.

Or maybe you can write a shell that runs a gitolite-shell command is its arguments are not already gitolite-shell?