Administrator Docs (CORE ONLY)

Learn how to administer your self-managed GitLab instance.

GitLab has two product distributions available through different subscriptions:

• The open source GitLab Community Edition (CE).
• The open core GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE).

You can install either GitLab CE or GitLab EE. However, the features you'll have access to depend on the subscription you choose (Core, Starter, Premium, or Ultimate).

NOTE: Note: GitLab Community Edition installations only have access to Core features.

GitLab.com is administered by GitLab, Inc., therefore, only GitLab team members have access to its admin configurations. If you're a GitLab.com user, please check the user documentation.

NOTE: Note: Non-administrator users don’t have access to GitLab administration tools and settings.

Installing and maintaining GitLab

Learn how to install, configure, update, and maintain your GitLab instance.

Installing GitLab

• Install: Requirements, directory structures, and installation methods.
  • Database load balancing: Distribute database queries among multiple database servers. (STARTER ONLY)
  • Omnibus support for log forwarding (STARTER ONLY)
• High Availability: Configure multiple servers for scaling or high availability.
  • Installing GitLab HA on Amazon Web Services (AWS): Set up GitLab High Availability on Amazon AWS.
• Geo: Replicate your GitLab instance to other geographic locations as a read-only fully operational version. (PREMIUM ONLY)
• Disaster Recovery: Quickly fail-over to a different site with minimal effort in a disaster situation. (PREMIUM ONLY)
• Pivotal Tile: Deploy GitLab as a pre-configured appliance using Ops Manager (BOSH) for Pivotal Cloud Foundry. (PREMIUM ONLY)
• Add License: Upload a license at install time to unlock features that are in paid tiers of GitLab. (STARTER ONLY)

Configuring GitLab

• Adjust your instance's timezone: Customize the default time zone of GitLab.
• System hooks: Notifications when users, projects and keys are changed.
• Security: Learn what you can do to further secure your GitLab instance.
• Usage statistics, version check, and usage ping: Enable or disable information about your instance to be sent to GitLab, Inc.
• Global user settings: Configure instance-wide user permissions.
• Polling: Configure how often the GitLab UI polls for updates.
• GitLab Pages configuration: Enable and configure GitLab Pages.
• GitLab Pages configuration for GitLab source installations: Enable and configure GitLab Pages on source installations.
• Uploads configuration: Configure GitLab uploads storage.
• Environment variables: Supported environment variables that can be used to override their defaults values in order to configure GitLab.
• Plugins: With custom plugins, GitLab administrators can introduce custom integrations without modifying GitLab's source code.
• Enforcing Terms of Service
• Third party offers
• Compliance: A collection of features from across the application that you may configure to help ensure that your GitLab instance and DevOps workflow meet compliance standards.
• Diff limits: Configure the diff rendering size limits of branch comparison pages.
• Merge request diffs storage: Configure merge requests diffs external storage.
• Broadcast Messages: Send messages to GitLab users through the UI.
• Elasticsearch: Enable Elasticsearch to empower GitLab's Advanced Global Search. Useful when you deal with a huge amount of data. (STARTER ONLY)
• External Classification Policy Authorization (PREMIUM ONLY)
• Upload a license: Upload a license to unlock features that are in paid tiers of GitLab. (STARTER ONLY)
• Admin Area: for self-managed instance-wide configuration and maintenance.

Customizing GitLab's appearance

• Header logo: Change the logo on all pages and email headers.
• Favicon: Change the default favicon to your own logo.
• Branded login page: Customize the login page with your own logo, title, and description.
• Welcome message: Add a custom welcome message to the sign-in page.
• "New Project" page: Customize the text to be displayed on the page that opens whenever your users create a new project.
• Additional custom email text: Add additional custom text to emails sent from GitLab. (PREMIUM ONLY)

Maintaining GitLab

• Raketasks: Perform various tasks for maintenance, backups, automatic webhooks setup, etc.
  • Backup and restore: Backup and restore your GitLab instance.
• Operations: Keeping GitLab up and running (clean up Redis sessions, moving repositories, Sidekiq MemoryKiller, Unicorn).
• Restart GitLab: Learn how to restart GitLab and its components.
• Invalidate markdown cache: Invalidate any cached markdown.

Updating GitLab

• GitLab versions and maintenance policy: Understand GitLab versions and releases (Major, Minor, Patch, Security), as well as update recommendations.
• Update GitLab: Update guides to upgrade your installation to a new version.
• Downtimeless updates: Upgrade to a newer major, minor, or patch version of GitLab without taking your GitLab instance offline.
• Migrate your GitLab CI/CD data to another version of GitLab: If you have an old GitLab installation (older than 8.0), follow this guide to migrate your existing GitLab CI/CD data to another version of GitLab.

Upgrading or downgrading GitLab

• Upgrade from GitLab CE to GitLab EE: learn how to upgrade GitLab Community Edition to GitLab Enterprise Editions.
• Downgrade from GitLab EE to GitLab CE: Learn how to downgrade GitLab Enterprise Editions to Community Edition.

GitLab platform integrations

• Mattermost: Integrate with Mattermost, an open source, private cloud workplace for web messaging.
• PlantUML: Create simple diagrams in AsciiDoc and Markdown documents created in snippets, wikis, and repos.
• Web terminals: Provide terminal access to your applications deployed to Kubernetes from within GitLab's CI/CD environments.

User settings and permissions

• Libravatar: Use Libravatar instead of Gravatar for user avatars.
• Sign-up restrictions: block email addresses of specific domains, or whitelist only specific domains.
• Access restrictions: Define which Git access protocols can be used to talk to GitLab (SSH, HTTP, HTTPS).
• Authentication and Authorization: Configure external authentication with LDAP, SAML, CAS and additional providers.
  • Sync LDAP (STARTER ONLY)
  • Kerberos authentication (STARTER ONLY)
  • See also other authentication topics (for example, enforcing 2FA).
• Email users: Email GitLab users from within GitLab. (STARTER ONLY)
• User Cohorts: Display the monthly cohorts of new users and their activities over time.
• Audit logs and events: View the changes made within the GitLab server for:
  • Groups and projects. (STARTER)
  • Instances. (PREMIUM ONLY)
• Auditor users: Users with read-only access to all projects, groups, and other resources on the GitLab instance. (PREMIUM ONLY)
• Incoming email: Configure incoming emails to allow users to reply by email, create issues by email and merge requests by email, and to enable Service Desk.
  • Postfix for incoming email: Set up a basic Postfix mail server with IMAP authentication on Ubuntu for incoming emails.
• Abuse reports: View and resolve abuse reports from your users.

Project settings

• Container Registry: Configure Container Registry with GitLab.
• Issue closing pattern: Customize how to close an issue from commit messages.
• Gitaly: Configuring Gitaly, GitLab's Git repository storage service.
• Default labels: Create labels that will be automatically added to every new project.
• Restrict the use of public or internal projects: Restrict the use of visibility levels for users when they create a project or a snippet.
• Custom project templates: Configure a set of projects to be used as custom templates when creating a new project. (PREMIUM ONLY)
• Packages: Enable GitLab to act as a Maven repository or NPM registry. (PREMIUM ONLY)

Repository settings

• Repository checks: Periodic Git repository checks.
• Repository storage paths: Manage the paths used to store repositories.
• Repository storage rake tasks: A collection of rake tasks to list and migrate existing projects and attachments associated with it from Legacy storage to Hashed storage.
• Limit repository size: Set a hard limit for your repositories' size. (STARTER ONLY)

Continuous Integration settings

• Enable/disable GitLab CI/CD: Enable or disable GitLab CI/CD for your instance.
• GitLab CI/CD admin settings: Enable or disable Auto DevOps site-wide and define the artifacts' max size and expiration time.
• Job artifacts: Enable, disable, and configure job artifacts (a set of files and directories which are outputted by a job when it completes successfully).
• Job traces: Information about the job traces (logs).
• Register Shared and specific Runners: Learn how to register and configure Shared and specific Runners to your own instance.
• Shared Runners pipelines quota: Limit the usage of pipeline minutes for Shared Runners. (STARTER ONLY)
• Enable/disable Auto DevOps: Enable or disable Auto DevOps for your instance.

Git configuration options

• Custom Git hooks: Custom Git hooks (on the filesystem) for when webhooks aren't enough.
• Git LFS configuration: Learn how to configure LFS for GitLab.
• Housekeeping: Keep your Git repositories tidy and fast.
• Configuring Git Protocol v2: Git protocol version 2 support.

Monitoring GitLab

• Monitoring GitLab:
  • Monitoring uptime: Check the server status using the health check endpoint.
  • IP whitelist: Monitor endpoints that provide health check information when probed.
  • Monitoring GitHub imports: GitLab's GitHub Importer displays Prometheus metrics to monitor the health and progress of the importer.

Performance Monitoring

• GitLab Performance Monitoring:
  • Enable Performance Monitoring: Enable GitLab Performance Monitoring.
  • GitLab performance monitoring with InfluxDB: Configure GitLab and InfluxDB for measuring performance metrics.
  • InfluxDB Schema: Measurements stored in InfluxDB.
  • GitLab performance monitoring with Prometheus: Configure GitLab and Prometheus for measuring performance metrics.
  • GitLab performance monitoring with Grafana: Configure GitLab to visualize time series metrics through graphs and dashboards.
  • Request Profiling: Get a detailed profile on slow requests.
  • Performance Bar: Get performance information for the current page.

Analytics

• Pseudonymizer: Export data from GitLab's database to CSV files in a secure way. (ULTIMATE)

Troubleshooting

• Debugging tips: Tips to debug problems when things go wrong
• Log system: Where to look for logs.
• Sidekiq Troubleshooting: Debug when Sidekiq appears hung and is not processing jobs.
• Useful diagnostics tools that are sometimes used by the GitLab Support team.
• Troubleshooting ElasticSearch: Tips to troubleshoot ElasticSearch.
• Kubernetes troubleshooting: Commands and tips useful for troubleshooting Kubernetes-related issues.
• Useful links from the Support Team:
  • GitLab Developer Docs.
  • Repairing and recovering broken git repositories.
  • Testing with OpenSSL.
  • Strace zine.