GitLab is much more powerful git repository manager than the previously described SCM-Manager. Furthermore it has its own CI environment, issue tracking, code review and wiki. At this time I show you GitLab installation process on Ubuntu Server and the first steps.

Installation

Go to GitLab download page , choose your OS version and follow the instructions.

In our case(Ubuntu Server) select the latest Ubuntu package. When I was written this tutorial, the installation instruction contains two steps:

• Install GitLab dependencies
• GitLab installation

Important! For this tutorial purposes change default GitLab HTTP port to 9093. The default GitLab port is 80. We are going to install few more tools, so to avoid conflicts, we will change every default ports configuration.

Install GitLab dependencies

Run below command to install GitLab dependencies (you don’t have to install postfix server if you don’t need)

sudo apt-get install curl openssh-server ca-certificates postfix

Alternative

sudo apt-get install curl openssh-server ca-certificates

Install GitLab

Add repository and install GitLab.

curl -sS https://packages.gitlab.com/install/repositories/gitlab/gitlab-ce/script.deb.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt-get install gitlab-ce

After installation you will see:

gitlab: To configure and start GitLab, RUN THE FOLLOWING COMMAND:
sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure

To finish installation you need to reconfigure GitLab:

sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure

After that you should see something like:

Running handlers complete
Chef Client finished, 221/308 resources updated in 01 minutes 39 seconds
gitlab Reconfigured!

Change default GitLab port number 80 to 9093

Edit the GitLab configuration file.

sudo nano /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb

Find and change the line

external_url 'http://ubuntu-tutorial'

to:

external_url 'http://ubuntu-tutorial:9093'

To take effect run:

sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure

Starting, stopping and restarting GitLab service in Ubuntu

sudo gitlab-ctl start

sudo gitlab-ctl stop

sudo gitlab-ctl restart

GitLab first run

Open GitLab web console

http://<GITLAB_SERVER_IP_ADDRESS>:90903/

In my case:

http://192.168.1.56:9093/

First time root user password change

When you run GitLab web console the first time, you have to set root user password. Set welcome1 as root password.

Adding tutorial user

Login as root user and go to administration panel (1). Scroll down and click New User (2). Type user information (3) and click the Create user(4) button.

Set the tutorial user password to welcome1 on the first login attempt.

Adding projects group and the owner

Go to administration panel (1). Scroll down and click New Group(2). Enter better-coding-tutorials as Group path (3) and click Create group (4).

The next step is to add tutorial user as projects owner (5,6,7). If everything is ok you see that the tutorial user is a member of better-coding-tutorials group (8).

First GitLab repository

Login as tutorial user and click New Project(1). Select better-coding-tutorials as projects group(2), 01-gitlab-test as name(3) and click Create project (4).

Testing the repository

Copy repository address(1) and make an initial push to repository.

cd /tmp
git clone http://ubuntu-tutorial:9093/better-coding-tutorials/01-gitlab-test.git
cd 01-gitlab-test
touch README.md
git add README.md
git commit -m "add README"
git push -u origin master

As you can see the commit appears in remote repository(1), but the user is unknown(2).

To fix it just configure your git client and do another commit.

git config --global user.email tutorial@better-coding.com
git config --global user.name Tutorial

cd /tmp/01-gitlab-test
echo "Test readme" > README.md 
git add README.md
git commit -m "Sample README"
git push -u origin master