GitLab Omnibus packages now include GitLab CI

Back in February of this year, we radically simplified the installation process of GitLab with the first release of our Omnibus packages for GitLab. Today we are excited to announce that our Omnibus packages now include the GitLab CI Coordinator.

To start using GitLab CI on your GitLab server you need to take the following steps:

• download and install the latest Omnibus package for your platform;
• create a DNS record for GitLab CI pointing to your GitLab server, e.g. ci.example.com;
• add the following line to /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb:

# External URL to reach the GitLab CI Coordinator at
ci_external_url 'http://ci.example.com'

Then run sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure and you have a CI Coordinator running on your GitLab server, integrated with GitLab!

To start running your builds, set up one or more GitLab CI Runners.

The Omnibus-specific documentation for GitLab CI Coordinator can be found in the Omnibus-GitLab repo.

If you want to run the GitLab CI Coordinator on a separate server from your GitLab server you can disable the GitLab services bundled in the Omnibus packages.

Under the hood

Running GitLab CI in the standard configuration (2 Unicorn workers) will require about 500MB of RAM.

By bundling the GitLab CI Coordinator into the Omnibus packages we are able to reuse the bundled Ruby, Postgres, NGINX and Redis, as well as the gitlab-ctl utility. Because of all this reuse of available components, GitLab CI is adding only about 20MB of data to the package downloads. If you are not using GitLab CI you will not notice that it is there.

Update 2014-11-06 18:17 CET: Fixed the date attribute on the blog post.