I just went throught gitolite's readme, and I don't see any reason why a lone dev might want to use it, since it seems to be built for managing teams with access control needs.

Doing it manually for me just means (on the server):

      mkdir project_name
      cd project_name
      git init --bare

Hardy difficult.

I already have ssh keys set up from long back, so that's all I have to do really. Then I just add the remote repository on my local machine.