Getting started with GitLab and DigitalOcean

_This tutorial is adapted from the [How To Use the GitLab One-Click Install

Image to Manage Git Repositories]do-source tutorial on DigitalOcean._

Introduction

Collaborating on projects, keeping track of source changes, and maintaining a

clean code repository are some great reasons to use a version control system.

Version control is now considered an essential tool in software development.

Git is the most popular distributed version control system. GitLab is a Git

repository management server that can be used to host repositories and set up

control structures for git within a clean web interface. It is built on Ruby on

Rails.

DigitalOcean has created a GitLab application image that can be used to

instantly deploy GitLab Community Edition on a DigitalOcean Ubuntu 14.04 x86-64

droplet using the Omnibus installer. You can have your own repository system

up and running in minutes.

Requirements

The GitLab documentation recommends a minimum of 2GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores

for optimum performance. If your projects are small (fewer than 100 users total),

1GB of RAM and 1 CPU core may be sufficient, but make sure you have at least 1GB

swap. You can follow the How To Add Swap on Ubuntu 14.04 tutorial.

Low memory may result in 500 server errors ("cannot allocate memory"), so make

sure you add enough RAM according to your needs.

Step One – Create a GitLab Droplet

Before you begin using GitLab, you need to spin up a DigitalOcean droplet using

the provided image.

From the Control Panel, click on the "Create Droplet" button that is visible

from any page:

Under the "Choose an image" section, select the "One-click Apps" tab and click

the "GitLab" image (the version might differ).

The next step is to choose the droplet size and the region you would like to use.

Add any SSH Keys, select any settings you'd like to use, and click "Create" at

the bottom.

Your GitLab droplet will be created and available in a few minutes!

Step Two – Configure Domain Names and Emails

We still need to configure just a few things first to utilize our environment.

Begin by setting up the domain name you would like to use for your GitLab

instance. Learn how to set up domain names on DigitalOcean if you

want to use DigitalOcean's nameservers.

Note:

If you don't have a domain name at your disposal, you can just use your

droplet's IP address, but GitLab will not be able to send emails without

using an SMTP server.

Once your domain name is configured correctly, you need to adjust some values

on the actual VPS instance. Log into your droplet as root through SSH, and open

the GitLab configuration file with your text editor:

vim /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb

Uncomment and adjust the external_url parameter to match your domain name:

external_url "http://your_domain.com/"

If you have generated an SSL certificate for your domain, you can

configure GitLab to use it in this file as well. The following settings set the

locations of the SSL certificates and instruct the NGINX web server to redirect

the HTTP traffic to HTTPS. Note that for HTTPS to work, you must set the URL

scheme in external_url as https:

external_url "https://your_domain.com/"


nginx['ssl_certificate'] = "/etc/gitlab/ssl/your_domain.com.crt"

nginx['ssl_certificate_key'] = "/etc/gitlab/ssl/your_domain.com.key"

nginx['redirect_http_to_https'] = true

GitLab uses its own bundled NGINX web server. You can find more information like

using your own external web server, changing the ports NGINX listens to, etc.,

in the official documentation.

While we're in this file, we can adjust the email settings that GitLab will use

in the "From:" field in automated emails, and the email display name, respectively:

gitlab_rails['gitlab_email_from'] = "gitlab@your_domain.com"

gitlab_rails['gitlab_email_display_name'] = 'Example'

The GitLab One-Click application is configured to use a local postfix server

for sending emails. If you wish to use it with GitLab you might want to set it

up correctly. Follow the "[How To Install and Configure Postfix as a Send-Only

SMTP Server on Ubuntu 14.04]do-postfix" tutorial for more information. For a

production site, you will likely want to use an external service such as

Mandrill or SendGrid. If so, you can configure the SMTP settings here

as well.

After saving and closing the file, we just need to reconfigure the service:

gitlab-ctl reconfigure

This should be done whenever you make configuration changes in order for them to

take effect.

Step Three – Log into GitLab

When you connect to your GitLab instance via SSH or the DigitalOcean web console,

you will see the message of the day (MOTD) which contains your randomly generated

GitLab password. It will look like this:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thank you for using DigitalOcean's GitLab Application.

Your GitLab instance can be accessed at http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/

The default credentials for GitLab are:

Username: root

Password: e0wXRM4fLmb6


You can find more information on using this image at: http://do.co/gitlabapp

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Next, open a web browser and navigate to your domain name (or the IP address of

your Droplet if you did not set up a domain name). You will be able to log in

using the credentials you found above.

You now have a full GitLab server configured and at your disposal to manage your

repositories.

Step Four – Modify Account Information

It would probably be more helpful if the account you're using, more accurately

reflected your information. This will allow you to receive email updates and

will display your information to other users. The root account is the first one

created by default, and it contains some predefined values for "Name", "Username"

and "Email". You can change all that from the "Admin Area".

Let's navigate to the "Admin Area" by clicking the wrench icon in the top-right

corner.

In the left sidebar click Users. This should only contain one user, the

Administrator account you are logged into.

Click on the "Edit" button and change the account information at the top.

The "Name" field will be your name as displayed to other users. The "Username"

can be used to log in and it defines the owner of your projects. The "Email"

is where alerts will be sent.

It is important to at least change the email field.

Click "Save changes" at the bottom for the changes to take effect.

Updating to Newer Releases

The GitLab One-Click application is configured to use the GitLab Apt repository.

Updating to the most recent version is as simple as running:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

Before upgrading to a new release, GitLab automatically backups the database.

If you wish to make a full back up of your existing installation, run:

sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:backup:create

The resulting backup will be located in: /var/opt/gitlab/backups. You can read

more in the Omnibus backup documentation.

Conclusion

You should now have a server configured to handle your team's Git projects. You

can easily manage user access, configure both public and private repositories,

and get an overview of your projects' issues and commits.

GitLab has a great help system accessible from within the user interface

(visit https://your_domain.com/help). In a future article, we will discuss

how to manage repositories and users and effectively take advantage of the

interface.

For further information on configuring your GitLab Omnibus installation, check

out the official documentation.

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If you already have GitLab installed and want to use the integrated CI

for your projects, check our other tutorial on

setting up GitLab Runner on DigitalOcean.

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Photo credits: https://flic.kr/p/9RAQ2J (CC BY-NC 2.0)