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GitLab

Official Ubuntu Installation Instructions

Versions

GitLab offers two types of instances, SaaS and self-hosted. SaaS is their hosted gitlab.com instance which you can sign up on an purchase different tiers. The second is a self-hosted environment with limitations based on the license purchased.

SaaS

Differences in SaaS GitLab versions

Support for CI tools and dashboards come with Bronze

Support for Conan, Maven, NPM come with Silver.

Support for major security features comes with Gold.

Self-hosted

Differences in self-hosted GitLab versions

Its good to know that you can always upgrade your CE instance to EE just by installing the EE packages ontop of the CE.

Its also good to know what would happen to your instance should your subscription expire if considering a EE license

Installation

Ansible Role

Docker CE Image

Docker EE Image

GitLab uses their Omnibus GitLab package to group the services needed to host a GitLab instance without creating confusing configuration scenarios.

GitLab can be hosted on a Pi which means you can do some tweaking to improve performance or save some resources on your host. Some options would be splitting the DBs from the host and reducing running processes. Both are described and documented in the link above.

Docker Compose

Official Compose Documentation

Currently, the basic docker-compose.yml shown on the official documentation is seen below.

web:
  image: 'gitlab/gitlab-ce:latest'
  restart: always
  hostname: 'gitlab.example.com'
  environment:
    GITLAB_OMNIBUS_CONFIG: |
      external_url 'https://gitlab.example.com'
      # Add any other gitlab.rb configuration here, each on its own line
  ports:
    - '80:80'
    - '443:443'
    - '22:22'
  volumes:
    - '$GITLAB_HOME/config:/etc/gitlab'
    - '$GITLAB_HOME/logs:/var/log/gitlab'
    - '$GITLAB_HOME/data:/var/opt/gitlab'

By default, docker will name this container by prefixing the web service name with pathname_ relevant to your current working directory. If you want to name this container add container_name: name within the web layer of this docker-compose.yml

Required Modifications

We need to make sure to replace hostname and external_url with relevant URLs for our environment or starting this container will fail.

We also need to ensure that we either replace the environment varialble $GITLAB_HOME or set it to a value relevant to your environment. Otherwise, when starting this container Docker will not be able to bind the volumes and we will not be able to modify the required configuration files within them.

If you want to see what other environment variables are set with this image, run the following command

docker run gitlab/gitlab-ce env

For this image, we see the following output.

PATH=/opt/gitlab/embedded/bin:/opt/gitlab/bin:/assets:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
HOSTNAME=0a37118aae33
LANG=C.UTF-8
TERM=xterm
HOME=/root

Serving Locally

Working on hosting this container on localhost? Because DNS resolves locally on your host first, you can override any URL within your /etc/hosts file by passing the below configuration, which allows us to visit www.myspace.com within a web browser to see the content being served locally. 

127.0.0.1   localhost www.myspace.com myspace.com

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1     ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters

GitLab Configurations

To modify these files, which configure several back-end options for our GitLab instance, we can start and stop our services so Docker mounts the volumes containing the files we need to edit. Run docker-compose up -d and check the directory you input for $GITLAB_HOME in your docker-compose.yml. After a few seconds, we should notice this directory contains some new configurations. Stop the container for now with docker-compose down and edit the configurations in the sections below.

gitlab.rb

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