# Operating Systems ## Linux GitLab is developed for the Linux operating system. GitLab officially supports (recent versions of) these Linux distributions: - Ubuntu Linux - Debian/GNU Linux It should also work on (though they are not officially supported): - Arch - CentOS - Fedora - Gentoo - RedHat ## Other Unix Systems There is nothing that prevents GitLab from running on other Unix operating systems. This means you may get it to work on systems running FreeBSD or OS X. **If you want to try, please proceed with caution!** ## Windows GitLab does **not** run on Windows and we have no plans of supporting it in the near future. Please consider using a virtual machine to run GitLab. # Rubies GitLab requires Ruby (MRI) 1.9.3 and several Gems with native components. While it is generally possible to use other Rubies (like [JRuby](http://jruby.org/) or [Rubinius](http://rubini.us/)) it might require some work on your part. # Hardware requirements ## CPU We recommend a processor with **4 cores**. At a minimum you need a processor with 2 cores to responsively run an unmodified installation. ## Memory We recommend you to run GitLab on a server with at least **1GB of RAM** memory. You can use it with 512MB of memory but you need to setup unicorn to use only 1 worker and you need at least 200MB of swap. The minimal requirement for an unmodified installation is 768MB. With 1.5GB of memory you should be able to support 1000+ users. ## Storage The necessary hard drive space largely depends on the size of the repos you want to store in GitLab. But as a *rule of thumb* you should have at least twice as much free space as your all repos combined take up. You need twice the storage because [GitLab satellites](https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/master/doc/install/structure.md) contain an extra copy of each repo. Apart from a local hard drive you can also mount a volume that supports the network file system (NFS) protocol. This volume might be located on a file server, a network attached storage (NAS) device, a storage area network (SAN) or on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume. If you have enough RAM memory and a recent CPU the speed of GitLab is mainly limited by hard drive seek times. Having a fast drive (7200 RPM and up) or a solid state drive (SSD) will improve the responsiveness of GitLab. # Installation troubles and reporting success or failure If you have troubles installing GitLab following the official installation guide or want to share your experience installing GitLab on a not officially supported platform, please follow the the contribution guide (see CONTRIBUTING.md).