The Community edition of Gitlab is available free for use in the development and production environment. It provides a large number of features required for small to large-scale companies. The enterprise edition provides more features but required a paid license. This tutorial will help you to install Gitlab on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux system. You are going to install Gitlab community edition using this tutorial.
Prerequisites
Login to your Ubuntu 20.04 system with sudo privileged account. Then upgrade the current packages to the latest version. Also, install some required packages for installing Gitlab on Ubuntu systems.
Step 1 – Install Gitlab on Ubuntu 20.04
The Gitlab official team provides a shell script to configure Apt repository on your system. As well as install some required dependencies to your system. Open a terminal and execute following command: The above command will create apt configuration file (/etc/apt/sources.list.d/gitlab_gitlab-ce.list) in your system. Next is to install Gitlab on Ubuntu system using apt command: This command will take some time to complete the Gitlab installation on Ubuntu. This will install all the required services like Nginx, PostgreSQL, Redis, etc.
Step 2 – Configuring Gitlab
Edit the Gitlab configuration file /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb and update the external url to a valid domain or subdomain name to use for accessing Gitlab. The Gitlab also provides native support for configuring let’s encrypt SSL certificates. To enable the let’s encrypt SSL, edit the following values in the configuration file. Save the configuration file. The vim editor user use ESC + :wq to save and exit file. The nano user can use shotcut CTRL + o to save content and then CTRL + x to exit from editor. Now, run the reconfigure command to apply changes to the Gitlab server. This will take some time to complete the installation. In the end, you will see the message “gitlab Reconfigured!” on your screen.
Step 3 – Adjust Firewall
If your system running a firewall, make sure to open 80, 443 ports. The firewalld users can use the following commands to open required ports on their system. Next, run the following command to implement the changes:
Step 4 – Access Gitlab Dashboard
Access the Gitlab dashboard using the domain name configured in the Gitlab configuration file. Open a web browser and access your domain: https://gitlab.tecadmin.net During the first time, Gitlab will prompt you to set a new password for the default user. The Gitlab default username is “root”, have the administrator privileges. Set a strong password for this account.
After changing the password, your browser redirects to the login page. Here use “root” as the username and password, you set in above to log in as an administrator.
Hit Sign in button to login Gitlab administrator dashboard. You have successfully installed Gitlab on your Ubuntu system. Next, create users, groups, and repositories for your code to be managed under the Git version control system.
Step 5 – Configure Backups
Use the following command to take a complete backup of your data. The default backup created under the /var/opt/gitlab/backups directory, which can be change in /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb file. You can also add the same command scheduler to back up data nightly. Add the below job to the system crontab.
Conclusion
This tutorial helped you to install and configure Gitlab on the Ubuntu system. Also provides you instructions to configure let’s encrypt SSL on Gitlab.
