Patching an instance

Sometimes, we need to ask a customer to patch their systems manually. This may be because:

The customer can't upgrade to the newest version, but needs a fix from that version.

We have a fix merged, but not yet in a release.

The fix for their issue is still in development, but we'd like to verify that it resolves the customer's problem.

For Omnibus installs on a single server, this is fairly straightforward. Replace $mr_iid below with the IID of the merge request, or change the URL to point to a raw snippet.

$ curl -o /tmp/$mr_iid.patch https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/$mr_iid.patch
$ cd /opt/gitlab/embedded/service/gitlab-rails
$ patch -p1 -b -f < /tmp/$mr_iid.patch
$ gitlab-ctl restart

To revert the patch, use the .orig files the patch program generates.

Please note that if GitLab is upgraded, the patch will need to be reapplied.

Note: this process only applies to the Rails application (the GitLab repository). Other components may need additional steps.