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GitLab Helm Chart

This is the official and recommended way to install GitLab on a cloud native environment. For more information on other available GitLab Helm Charts, see the charts overview.

Introduction

The gitlab chart is the best way to operate GitLab on Kubernetes. This chart contains all the required components to get started, and can scale to large deployments.

The default deployment includes:

  • Core GitLab components: Unicorn, Shell, Workhorse, Registry, Sidekiq, and Gitaly
  • Optional dependencies: Postgres, Redis, Minio
  • An auto-scaling, unprivileged GitLab Runner using the Kubernetes executor
  • Automatically provisioned SSL via Let's Encrypt.

Limitations

Some features of GitLab are not currently available:

Installing GitLab using the Helm Chart

The gitlab chart includes all required dependencies, and takes a few minutes to deploy.

TIP: Tip: For production deployments, we strongly recommend using the detailed installation instructions utilizing external Postgres, Redis, and object storage services.

Requirements

In order to deploy GitLab on Kubernetes, the following are required:

  1. helm and kubectl installed on your computer.
  2. A Kubernetes cluster, version 1.8 or higher. 6vCPU and 16GB of RAM is recommended.
  3. A wildcard DNS entry and external IP address
  4. Authenticate and connect to the cluster
  5. Configure and initialize Helm Tiller.

Deployment of GitLab to Kubernetes

To deploy GitLab, the following three parameters are required:

  • global.hosts.domain: the base domain of the wildcard host entry. For example, example.com if the wild card entry is *.example.com.
  • global.hosts.externalIP: the external IP which the wildcard DNS resolves to.
  • certmanager-issuer.email: the email address to use when requesting new SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt.

NOTE: Note: For deployments to Amazon EKS, there are additional configuration requirements. A full list of configuration options is also available.

Once you have all of your configuration options collected, you can get any dependencies and run helm. In this example, the helm release is named "gitlab":

helm repo add gitlab https://charts.gitlab.io/
helm repo update
helm upgrade --install gitlab gitlab/gitlab \
  --timeout 600 \
  --set global.hosts.domain=example.com \
  --set global.hosts.externalIP=10.10.10.10 \
  --set certmanager-issuer.email=email@example.com

Monitoring the Deployment

This will output the list of resources installed once the deployment finishes, which may take 5-10 minutes.

The status of the deployment can be checked by running helm status gitlab which can also be done while the deployment is taking place if you run the command in another terminal.

Initial login

You can access the GitLab instance by visiting the domain name beginning with gitlab. followed by the domain specified during installation. From the example above, the URL would be https://gitlab.example.com.

If you manually created the secret for initial root password, you can use that to sign in as root user. If not, GitLab automatically created a random password for root user. This can be extracted by the following command (replace <name> by name of the release - which is gitlab if you used the command above):

kubectl get secret <name>-gitlab-initial-root-password -ojsonpath={.data.password} | base64 --decode ; echo

Outgoing email

By default outgoing email is disabled. To enable it, provide details for your SMTP server using the global.smtp and global.email settings. You can find details for these settings in the command line options.

If your SMTP server requires authentication make sure to read the section on providing your password in the secrets documentation. You can disable authentication settings with --set global.smtp.authentication="".

If your Kubernetes cluster is on GKE, be aware that SMTP ports 25, 465, and 587 are blocked.

Deploying the Community Edition

To deploy the Community Edition, include these options in your helm install command:

--set gitlab.migrations.image.repository=registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-org/build/cng/gitlab-rails-ce
--set gitlab.sidekiq.image.repository=registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-org/build/cng/gitlab-sidekiq-ce
--set gitlab.unicorn.image.repository=registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-org/build/cng/gitlab-unicorn-ce
--set gitlab.unicorn.workhorse.image=registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-org/build/cng/gitlab-workhorse-ce
--set gitlab.task-runner.image.repository=registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-org/build/cng/gitlab-task-runner-ce

Updating GitLab using the Helm Chart

Once your GitLab Chart is installed, configuration changes and chart updates should be done using helm upgrade:

helm repo update
helm upgrade --reuse-values gitlab gitlab/gitlab

Uninstalling GitLab using the Helm Chart

To uninstall the GitLab Chart, run the following:

helm delete gitlab