Using the Omnibus package

Before we start installing, you need to have a server installed with a Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit system, and have SSH access to the server.

Here is how you can install GitLab using Omnibus:

You can now log in with the username root and password 5iveL!fe.

We have just installed GitLab via the Omnibus installer. Omnibus is a way to package your application and install all the dependencies that are required to run it.

GitLab makes good use of this capability. As you only have to install a mail server and an OpenSSH server, all the other parts are automatically installed for you.

GitLab will auto configure itself with the recommended settings. If you want to change your configuration, you have to first create the configuration file. You can do this as follows:

$ sudo mkdir -p /etc/gitlab
$ sudo touch /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb
$ sudo chmod 600 /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb

The settings that you are most likely to change are the ones that are in the gitlab.yml file (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/config/gitlab.yml.example).

You need to make a small translation change in order to make this work, so let's say you want to change the port that GitLab is running on; normally, you would change the port value in the GitLab file, but now you have to add an entry to /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb.

So, for the port, the entry in gitlab.yml would look like the following code:

production: &base
  gitlab:
    port: 80

In the gitlab.rb file, you need to create the following entry: gitlab_rails['port'] = 80.