This document provides instructions for installing Gitlab with Gitolite and Git on CentOS. It involves setting up users, keys, and repositories to allow Gitlab to interface with the backend Gitolite server. Database and Rails environments are also configured. When completed, Gitlab can be accessed at http://ip-or-domain:3000/ with the default admin credentials.

1. Installing Gitlab with Gitolite and Git on CentOS
Md. Raiful Hasan
DIVINE IT LIMITED
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2. Requirements: CentOS 6.3 Minimal
Updating and adding basic software and services
Add EPEL repository
rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-7.noarch.rpm
Install the required tools for gitlab and
yum -y groupinstall 'Development Tools' 'Additional Development'
gitoliteyum -y install readline readline-devel ncurses-devel gdbm-devel glibc-devel tcl-devel openssl-devel
curl-devel expat-devel db4-devel byacc gitolite sqlite-devel gcc-c++ libyaml libyaml-devel libffi libffi-devel
libxml2 libxml2-devel libxslt libxslt-devel libicu libicu-devel system-config-firewall-tui python-devel redis
Downloading and extracting ruby:
curl -O http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.2-p320.tar.gz
tar xzvf ruby-1.9.2-p320.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.9.2-p320
Now here are two choices.
1. For Single ruby user.
2. For Multiple ruby versions user.
1 . Configure without binary suffix
./configure --enable-shared --disable-pthread
2 . Configure with binary suffix (for parallel installation of ruby versions)
./configure --enable-shared --disable-pthread --program-suffix _n
When choosing this option, the binary ruby will be named ruby_n and gem gem_n. Also we will have to
use rake_n.
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3. Now install ruby:
make && make install
Replace the 64 in the path with 32 if you're running on a 32 bit box
yum install qt-devel qtwebkit-devel
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib64/qt4/bin
Now we have to install all the gems GitLab needs to run:
gem update --system
gem update
gem install rails
Now everything is set up and we can start to configure the environment for GitLab. First we create a
user that will run GitLab:
adduser --shell /bin/bash --create-home --home-dir /home/gitlab gitlab
Because this user will be the Admin of the repos on the server, we need to have a RSA key pair to
authenticate:
su - gitlab -c "ssh-keygen -t rsa"
Now switch back to root account. Because GitLab is only a graphical user interface to manage repos, we
need a power full backend. gitolite will do this for us.
We also need a user for gitolite.
adduser --system --shell /bin/sh --comment 'gitolite' --create-home --home-dir /home/git git
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4. Gitolite needs to know one key that it knows as admin. We will pass the key of GitLab to gitolite. To do
so we first copy the private key of our gitlab user to the home
directory of our gitolite user:
# make sure do this as root
cp /home/gitlab/.ssh/id_rsa.pub /home/git/gitlab.pub
Now we need to initialize gitolite:
su git
gl-setup ~/gitlab.pub # this passes the admin key to gitolite
Switch back to root user now.
We now need to give our management software (GitLab) access to the repos:
usermod -a -G git gitlab
chmod -R g+rwX /home/git/repositories/
chmod 770 /home/git
Because the gitlab user will need a password later on, we configure it right now, so we are finished with
all the user stuff.
passwd gitlab # please choose a good password :)
As next step we need to introduce GitLab to gitolite (that is, we let them change their SSH-keys)
su gitlab
ssh root@localhost
... And back to the root user.
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5. GitLab needs a few gems, we haven't installed yet:
As mentioned before, the gitlab user will have to do a bit of administration stuff, so we need to give him
sudo rights. To do so, we edit the sudoers file with visudo:
visudo
Add gitlab ALL=(ALL) ALL after root ALL=(ALL) ALL so it looks like this:
...
root ALL=(ALL) ALL
gitlab ALL=(ALL) ALL
...
After another two gems we are finished with the gem stuff:
gem install ruby-debug19
gem install charlock_holmes
We now switch to our gitlab user and we won't use our root account anymore:
su gitlab
Get the GitLab software:
cd && git clone git://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq.git
cd gitlabhq
We're nearly done. Next we bundle our application.
bundle install
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6. GitLab will use a MySQL database (in our case), which we need to install and start:
yum -y install mysql-server
/etc/init.d/mysqld start
To configure the MySQL server easily we use:
mysql_secure_installation
Remember the password you type in for root!
We now connect to our database server to create a user for GitLab:
mysql -u root -p
We now have a mysql shell.
mysql> CREATE DATABASE gitlab CHARACTER SET UTF8;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON gitlab.* TO 'gitlabusr'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password' WITH GRANT
OPTION;
mysql> quit
Remember the password and username (here: gitlabusr and password)!
To create the database a script is deployed with GitLab. However it needs an additional service to run:
sudo nohup redis-server > /dev/null
Enter the password you created for the gitlab user and hit CTRL+Z. Then type
bg
The service is now running in background.
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7. We now configure GitLab by copying the configurion files from example to real:
cp ~/gitlabhq/config/database.yml.mysql ~/gitlabhq/config/database.yml
cp ~/gitlabhq/config/gitlab.yml.example ~/gitlabhq/config/gitlab.yml
In database.yml you have to edit the production settings of your database (at the very top of the file).
You have to change the database-name, username and password.
We will now create the database structure:
RAILS_ENV=production rake db:setup
RAILS_ENV=production rake db:seed_fu
To start the server we use
bundle exec rails s -e production
We're done. All us have to do now, is set up firewall and navigate to http://ip-or-domain:3000/ and log
in with
user: admin@local.host
pass: 5iveL!fe
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