Where do I start with GitLab?
We had to install 3 servers to finally get this up and running and I'm still not completely satisfied with it. It's frustrating to set up. It's great software when you get it up and running, there's no doubt about that, but it sure is a pain to get up and running.
Before I had done any work on setting up a GitLab server for WSU's CS department, I had a bit of experience with it. I had tried to set up GitLab on some distro of Linux before for playing around with at home following the install guide but didn't get anything working with it. We had a GitLab server running at my work at one point using the BitNami installer, but there were a few issues with it so we scraped it for something else.
The first attempt was a GitLab server install with the BitNami installer. We set up a CentOS and I ran the BitNami installer and got something up and running pretty easily. However, there was the most bizarre issue I had seen- for some strange reason pages would just show up as blank in Firefox unless you refreshed. I couldn't find anything covering the same issue at all. I didn't think something with an issue like that was worth keeping around, so we scrapped that and set up another CentOS server.
Here I decided to find a guide for installing GitLab on CentOS instead of relying on an installer or anything like that. In hindsight this probably wasn't the best idea, the official install guide recommends Ubuntu and we probably would have had a much easier time just going with Ubuntu server. However, we had CentOS on hand, and I much prefer using CentOS for a server as it has some pretty good default configuration files for a lot of applications.
I didn't have any issues with setting GitLab up initially using this guide, but afterwards a few problems became apparent. First off, neither SSH or HTTPS cloning worked. After a bit of hassle we got SSH working and were fine with that and decided that things were good to go. We sent in the request to UTS and got a public IP and subdomain for the server. However, we quickly discovered that sending emails didn't work. It turned out that it was trying to send emails from gitlab@ which get rejected. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anywhere to change where it was sending emails from. I changed configuration files all over the place but had no success at all in fixing that. It got to the point where I just settled on doing a complete reinstall with the subdomain in mind which would hopefully fix all the issues. I eventually decided that uninstalling GitLab would be too much of a hassle on its own, so I would have to make a completely new server install. After setting my mind on doing that I spent a bit more time trying to get the current one installed and totally broke it, and didn't care enough to fix it.
So finally, the last install, the one we have up and running. Using the same guide as before but documenting any oddities I found so we'd have a reasonable installation guide, I got it running and working to a pretty reasonable state, but with a few bumps along the way. First off, the guide recommends running a test to make sure everything's running before you set up the webserver. It gives an error if the webserver isn't up and running, but I had no indication this was caused by the webserver not being set-up. I decided to just install the webserver and hope it fixed it, and thankfully it did. Secondly, I tried Apache as the webserver, as the guide had the option of using nginx and apache. nginx seems like what GitLab was developed for so I used that for the previous installs, but for this one I decided to go with what I was familiar with. Didn't get anywhere with it, and just went back to nginx and go that working pretty easily. Thirdly, the SSH issue we had before came back. This issue had two parts: First off the SELinux permissions aren't set correctly for the ssh keys file. I'm not sure the exact cause for this, but I think it's because GitLab creates the file itself if one doesn't exist, so the correct permissions don't exist for it. It's an easy fix if you can figure out that's the issue, but there's really no clear indication that's the issue so I was stumped for a while until I decided to stop looking for GitLab related issues with SSH and instead CentOS related issues with SSH. It was a really simple command, restorecon -R -v /home/git/.ssh We didn't have this issue with the other server installs, but I think in those cases I disabled SELinux altogether and this time I was trying to get it to work with it. The other issue was that CentOS by default locks accounts without passwords. The GitLab docs recommend editing the /etc/shadow file manually, but I found a command that accomplishes the same thing without editing important configurations: usermod -U git. Email was working fine too.
I still need to get HTTPS cloning working. I believe it's an issue with using a self-signed certificate, so I'm going to try out using a CACert certificate and seeing if I can get it working from there.
Where do I start with GitLab?We had to install 3 servers to finally get this up and running and I'm still not completely satisfied with it. It's frustrating to set up. It's great software when you get it up and running, there's no doubt about that, but it sure is a pain to get up and running.
Before I had done any work on setting up a GitLab server for WSU's CS department, I had a bit of experience with it. I had tried to set up GitLab on some distro of Linux before for playing around with at home following the install guide but didn't get anything working with it. We had a GitLab server running at my work at one point using the BitNami installer, but there were a few issues with it so we scraped it for something else.
The first attempt was a GitLab server install with the BitNami installer. We set up a CentOS and I ran the BitNami installer and got something up and running pretty easily. However, there was the most bizarre issue I had seen- for some strange reason pages would just show up as blank in Firefox unless you refreshed. I couldn't find anything covering the same issue at all. I didn't think something with an issue like that was worth keeping around, so we scrapped that and set up another CentOS server.
Here I decided to find a guide for installing GitLab on CentOS instead of relying on an installer or anything like that. In hindsight this probably wasn't the best idea, the official install guide recommends Ubuntu and we probably would have had a much easier time just going with Ubuntu server. However, we had CentOS on hand, and I much prefer using CentOS for a server as it has some pretty good default configuration files for a lot of applications.
I didn't have any issues with setting GitLab up initially using this guide, but afterwards a few problems became apparent. First off, neither SSH or HTTPS cloning worked. After a bit of hassle we got SSH working and were fine with that and decided that things were good to go. We sent in the request to UTS and got a public IP and subdomain for the server. However, we quickly discovered that sending emails didn't work. It turned out that it was trying to send emails from gitlab@
So finally, the last install, the one we have up and running. Using the same guide as before but documenting any oddities I found so we'd have a reasonable installation guide, I got it running and working to a pretty reasonable state, but with a few bumps along the way. First off, the guide recommends running a test to make sure everything's running before you set up the webserver. It gives an error if the webserver isn't up and running, but I had no indication this was caused by the webserver not being set-up. I decided to just install the webserver and hope it fixed it, and thankfully it did. Secondly, I tried Apache as the webserver, as the guide had the option of using nginx and apache. nginx seems like what GitLab was developed for so I used that for the previous installs, but for this one I decided to go with what I was familiar with. Didn't get anywhere with it, and just went back to nginx and go that working pretty easily. Thirdly, the SSH issue we had before came back. This issue had two parts: First off the SELinux permissions aren't set correctly for the ssh keys file. I'm not sure the exact cause for this, but I think it's because GitLab creates the file itself if one doesn't exist, so the correct permissions don't exist for it. It's an easy fix if you can figure out that's the issue, but there's really no clear indication that's the issue so I was stumped for a while until I decided to stop looking for GitLab related issues with SSH and instead CentOS related issues with SSH. It was a really simple command, restorecon -R -v /home/git/.ssh We didn't have this issue with the other server installs, but I think in those cases I disabled SELinux altogether and this time I was trying to get it to work with it. The other issue was that CentOS by default locks accounts without passwords. The GitLab docs recommend editing the /etc/shadow file manually, but I found a command that accomplishes the same thing without editing important configurations: usermod -U git. Email was working fine too.
I still need to get HTTPS cloning working. I believe it's an issue with using a self-signed certificate, so I'm going to try out using a CACert certificate and seeing if I can get it working from there.
We had to install 3 servers to finally get this up and running and I'm still not completely satisfied with it. It's frustrating to set up. It's great software when you get it up and running, there's no doubt about that, but it sure is a pain to get up and running.
Before I had done any work on setting up a GitLab server for WSU's CS department, I had a bit of experience with it. I had tried to set up GitLab on some distro of Linux before for playing around with at home following the install guide but didn't get anything working with it. We had a GitLab server running at my work at one point using the BitNami installer, but there were a few issues with it so we scraped it for something else.
The first attempt was a GitLab server install with the BitNami installer. We set up a CentOS and I ran the BitNami installer and got something up and running pretty easily. However, there was the most bizarre issue I had seen- for some strange reason pages would just show up as blank in Firefox unless you refreshed. I couldn't find anything covering the same issue at all. I didn't think something with an issue like that was worth keeping around, so we scrapped that and set up another CentOS server.
Here I decided to find a guide for installing GitLab on CentOS instead of relying on an installer or anything like that. In hindsight this probably wasn't the best idea, the official install guide recommends Ubuntu and we probably would have had a much easier time just going with Ubuntu server. However, we had CentOS on hand, and I much prefer using CentOS for a server as it has some pretty good default configuration files for a lot of applications.
I didn't have any issues with setting GitLab up initially using this guide, but afterwards a few problems became apparent. First off, neither SSH or HTTPS cloning worked. After a bit of hassle we got SSH working and were fine with that and decided that things were good to go. We sent in the request to UTS and got a public IP and subdomain for the server. However, we quickly discovered that sending emails didn't work. It turned out that it was trying to send emails from gitlab@
So finally, the last install, the one we have up and running. Using the same guide as before but documenting any oddities I found so we'd have a reasonable installation guide, I got it running and working to a pretty reasonable state, but with a few bumps along the way. First off, the guide recommends running a test to make sure everything's running before you set up the webserver. It gives an error if the webserver isn't up and running, but I had no indication this was caused by the webserver not being set-up. I decided to just install the webserver and hope it fixed it, and thankfully it did. Secondly, I tried Apache as the webserver, as the guide had the option of using nginx and apache. nginx seems like what GitLab was developed for so I used that for the previous installs, but for this one I decided to go with what I was familiar with. Didn't get anywhere with it, and just went back to nginx and go that working pretty easily. Thirdly, the SSH issue we had before came back. This issue had two parts: First off the SELinux permissions aren't set correctly for the ssh keys file. I'm not sure the exact cause for this, but I think it's because GitLab creates the file itself if one doesn't exist, so the correct permissions don't exist for it. It's an easy fix if you can figure out that's the issue, but there's really no clear indication that's the issue so I was stumped for a while until I decided to stop looking for GitLab related issues with SSH and instead CentOS related issues with SSH. It was a really simple command, restorecon -R -v /home/git/.ssh We didn't have this issue with the other server installs, but I think in those cases I disabled SELinux altogether and this time I was trying to get it to work with it. The other issue was that CentOS by default locks accounts without passwords. The GitLab docs recommend editing the /etc/shadow file manually, but I found a command that accomplishes the same thing without editing important configurations: usermod -U git. Email was working fine too.
I still need to get HTTPS cloning working. I believe it's an issue with using a self-signed certificate, so I'm going to try out using a CACert certificate and seeing if I can get it working from there.
by Jillur Rahman
Jillur Rahman is a Web designers. He enjoys to make blogger templates. He always try to make modern and 3D looking Templates. You can by his templates from Themeforest.
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