gitlabhq/doc/install/installation.md

This installation guide was created for Debian/Ubuntu and tested on it.

Please read doc/install/requirements.md for hardware and platform requirements.

Important Note: The following steps have been known to work. If you deviate from this guide, do it with caution and make sure you don't violate any assumptions GitLab makes about its environment. For things like AWS installation scripts, init scripts or config files for alternative web server have a look at the "Advanced Setup Tips" section.

Important Note: If you find a bug/error in this guide please submit an issue or pull request following the contribution guide (see CONTRIBUTING.md).

---

Overview

The GitLab installation consists of setting up the following components:

1. Packages / Dependencies
2. Ruby
3. System Users
4. Gitolite
5. Database
6. GitLab
7. Nginx

1. Packages / Dependencies

sudo is not installed on Debian by default. If you don't have it you'll need to install it first.

# run as root
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get install sudo

Make sure your system is up-to-date:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Note: Vim is an editor that is used here whenever there are files that need to be edited by hand. But, you can use any editor you like instead.

# Install vim
sudo apt-get install -y vim

Install the required packages:

sudo apt-get install -y build-essential zlib1g-dev libyaml-dev libssl-dev libgdbm-dev libreadline-dev libncurses5-dev libffi-dev curl git-core openssh-server redis-server postfix checkinstall libxml2-dev libxslt-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libicu-dev

Make sure you have the right version of Python installed.

# Install Python
sudo apt-get install python

# Make sure that Python is 2.5+ (3.x is not supported at the moment)
python --version

# If it's Python 3 you might need to install Python 2 separately
sudo apt-get install python2.7

# Make sure you can access Python via python2
python2 --version

# If you get a "command not found" error create a link to the python binary
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/python2

2. Ruby

Download and compile it:

mkdir /tmp/ruby && cd /tmp/ruby
curl --progress http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.3-p327.tar.gz | tar xz
cd ruby-1.9.3-p327
./configure
make
sudo make install

Install the Bundler Gem:

sudo gem install bundler

3. System Users

Create a user for Git and Gitolite:

sudo adduser \
  --system \
  --shell /bin/sh \
  --gecos 'Git Version Control' \
  --group \
  --disabled-password \
  --home /home/git \
  git

Create a user for GitLab:

sudo adduser --disabled-login --gecos 'GitLab' gitlab

# Add it to the git group
sudo usermod -a -G git gitlab

# Generate the SSH key
sudo -u gitlab -H ssh-keygen -q -N '' -t rsa -f /home/gitlab/.ssh/id_rsa

4. Gitolite

Clone GitLab's fork of the Gitolite source code:

cd /home/git
sudo -u git -H git clone -b gl-v320 https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitolite.git /home/git/gitolite

Setup Gitolite with GitLab as its admin:

Important Note: GitLab assumes full and unshared control over this Gitolite installation.

# Add Gitolite scripts to $PATH
sudo -u git -H mkdir /home/git/bin
sudo -u git -H sh -c 'printf "%b\n%b\n" "PATH=\$PATH:/home/git/bin" "export PATH" >> /home/git/.profile'
sudo -u git -H sh -c 'gitolite/install -ln /home/git/bin'

# Copy the gitlab user's (public) SSH key ...
sudo cp /home/gitlab/.ssh/id_rsa.pub /home/git/gitlab.pub
sudo chmod 0444 /home/git/gitlab.pub

# ... and use it as the admin key for the Gitolite setup
sudo -u git -H sh -c "PATH=/home/git/bin:$PATH; gitolite setup -pk /home/git/gitlab.pub"

Fix the directory permissions for the configuration directory:

# Make sure the Gitolite config dir is owned by git
sudo chmod 750 /home/git/.gitolite/
sudo chown -R git:git /home/git/.gitolite/

Fix the directory permissions for the repositories:

# Make sure the repositories dir is owned by git and it stays that way
sudo chmod -R ug+rwXs,o-rwx /home/git/repositories/
sudo chown -R git:git /home/git/repositories/

Add domains to list to the list of known hosts

sudo -u gitlab -H ssh git@localhost
sudo -u gitlab -H ssh git@YOUR_DOMAIN_NAME
sudo -u gitlab -H ssh git@YOUR_GITOLITE_DOMAIN_NAME

Test if everything works so far

# Clone the admin repo so SSH adds localhost to known_hosts ...
# ... and to be sure your users have access to Gitolite
sudo -u gitlab -H git clone git@localhost:gitolite-admin.git /tmp/gitolite-admin

# If it succeeded without errors you can remove the cloned repo
sudo rm -rf /tmp/gitolite-admin

Important Note: If you can't clone the gitolite-admin repository: DO NOT PROCEED WITH INSTALLATION! Check the Trouble Shooting Guide and make sure you have followed all of the above steps carefully.

5. Database

See doc/install/databases.md

6. GitLab

# We'll install GitLab into home directory of the user "gitlab"
cd /home/gitlab

Clone the Source

# Clone GitLab repository
sudo -u gitlab -H git clone https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq.git gitlab

# Go to gitlab dir 
cd /home/gitlab/gitlab

# Checkout to stable release
sudo -u gitlab -H git checkout 4-1-stable

Note: You can change 4-1-stable to master if you want the bleeding edge version, but do so with caution!

Configure it

cd /home/gitlab/gitlab

# Copy the example GitLab config
sudo -u gitlab -H cp config/gitlab.yml.example config/gitlab.yml

# Make sure to change "localhost" to the fully-qualified domain name of your
# host serving GitLab where necessary
sudo -u gitlab -H vim config/gitlab.yml

# Make sure GitLab can write to the log/ and tmp/ directories
sudo chown -R gitlab log/
sudo chown -R gitlab tmp/
sudo chmod -R u+rwX  log/
sudo chmod -R u+rwX  tmp/

# Make directory for satellites
sudo -u gitlab -H mkdir /home/gitlab/gitlab-satellites

# Copy the example Unicorn config
sudo -u gitlab -H cp config/unicorn.rb.example config/unicorn.rb

Important Note: Make sure to edit both files to match your setup.

Configure GitLab DB settings

# Mysql
sudo -u gitlab cp config/database.yml.mysql config/database.yml

# PostgreSQL
sudo -u gitlab cp config/database.yml.postgresql config/database.yml

Make sure to update username/password in config/database.yml.

Install Gems

cd /home/gitlab/gitlab

sudo gem install charlock_holmes --version '0.6.9'

# For MySQL (note, the option says "without")
sudo -u gitlab -H bundle install --deployment --without development test postgres

# Or for PostgreSQL
sudo -u gitlab -H bundle install --deployment --without development test mysql

Configure Git

GitLab needs to be able to commit and push changes to Gitolite. In order to do that Git requires a username and email. (We recommend using the same address used for the email.from setting in config/gitlab.yml)

sudo -u gitlab -H git config --global user.name "GitLab"
sudo -u gitlab -H git config --global user.email "gitlab@localhost"

Setup GitLab Hooks

sudo cp ./lib/hooks/post-receive /home/git/.gitolite/hooks/common/post-receive
sudo chown git:git /home/git/.gitolite/hooks/common/post-receive

Initialise Database and Activate Advanced Features

sudo -u gitlab -H bundle exec rake gitlab:setup RAILS_ENV=production

Install Init Script

Download the init script (will be /etc/init.d/gitlab):

sudo curl --output /etc/init.d/gitlab https://raw.github.com/gitlabhq/gitlab-recipes/master/init.d/gitlab
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/gitlab

Make GitLab start on boot:

sudo update-rc.d gitlab defaults 21

Check Application Status

Check if GitLab and its environment is configured correctly:

sudo -u gitlab -H bundle exec rake gitlab:env:info RAILS_ENV=production

To make sure you didn't miss anything run a more thorough check with:

sudo -u gitlab -H bundle exec rake gitlab:check RAILS_ENV=production

If all items are green, then congratulations on successfully installing GitLab! However there are still a few steps left.

Start Your GitLab Instance

sudo service gitlab start
# or
sudo /etc/init.d/gitlab restart

7. Nginx

Note: If you can't or don't want to use Nginx as your web server, have a look at the "Advanced Setup Tips" section.

Installation

sudo apt-get install nginx

Site Configuration

Download an example site config:

sudo curl --output /etc/nginx/sites-available/gitlab https://raw.github.com/gitlabhq/gitlab-recipes/master/nginx/gitlab
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/gitlab /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/gitlab

Make sure to edit the config file to match your setup:

# Change **YOUR_SERVER_IP** and **YOUR_SERVER_FQDN**
# to the IP address and fully-qualified domain name
# of your host serving GitLab
sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/gitlab

Restart

sudo /etc/init.d/nginx restart

Done!

Visit YOUR_SERVER for your first GitLab login. The setup has created an admin account for you. You can use it to log in:

admin@local.host
5iveL!fe

Important Note: Please go over to your profile page and immediately chage the password, so nobody can access your GitLab by using this login information later on.

Enjoy!

---

Advanced Setup Tips

Custom Redis Connection

If you'd like Resque to connect to a Redis server on a non-standard port or on a different host, you can configure its connection string via the config/resque.yml file.

# example
production: redis.example.tld:6379

Custom SSH Connection

If you are running SSH on a non-standard port, you must change the gitlab user'S SSH config.

# Add to /home/gitlab/.ssh/config
host localhost          # Give your setup a name (here: override localhost)
    user git            # Your remote git user
    port 2222           # Your port number
    hostname 127.0.0.1; # Your server name or IP

You also need to change the corresponding options (e.g. ssh_user, ssh_host, admin_uri) in the config\gitlab.yml file.

User-contributed Configurations

You can find things like AWS installation scripts, init scripts or config files for alternative web server in our recipes collection.