• UPGRADE FAILED: “$name” has no deployed releases
• Error: this command needs 2 arguments: release name, chart path
• Application containers constantly initializing
• Applying configuration changes
• Included GitLab Runner failing to register
• Too many redirects
• Upgrades fail with Immutable Field Error
  • spec.clusterIP
  • spec.selector

Troubleshooting

UPGRADE FAILED: “$name” has no deployed releases

This error will occur on your second install/upgrade if your initial install failed.

If your initial install completely failed, and GitLab was never operational, you should first purge the failed install before installing again.

helm uninstall <release-name>

If instead, the initial install command timed out, but GitLab still came up successfully, you can add the --force flag to the helm upgrade command to ignore the error and attempt to update the release.

Otherwise, if you received this error after having previously had successful deploys of the GitLab chart, then you are encountering a bug. Please open an issue on our issue tracker, and also check out issue #630 where we recovered our CI server from this problem.

Error: this command needs 2 arguments: release name, chart path

An error like this could occur when you run helm upgrade and there are some spaces in the parameters. In the following example, Test Username is the culprit:

helm upgrade gitlab gitlab/gitlab --timeout 600s --set global.email.display_name=Test Username ...

To fix it, pass the parameters in single quotes:

helm upgrade gitlab gitlab/gitlab --timeout 600s --set global.email.display_name='Test Username' ...

Application containers constantly initializing

If you experience Sidekiq, Webservice, or other Rails based containers in a constant state of Initializing, you’re likely waiting on the dependencies container to pass.

If you check the logs of a given Pod specifically for the dependencies container, you may see the following repeated:

Checking database connection and schema version
WARNING: This version of GitLab depends on gitlab-shell 8.7.1, ...
Database Schema
Current version: 0
Codebase version: 20190301182457

This is an indication that the migrations Job has not yet completed. The purpose of this Job is to both ensure that the database is seeded, as well as all relevant migrations are in place. The application containers are attempting to wait for the database to be at or above their expected database version. This is to ensure that the application does not malfunction to the schema not matching expectations of the codebase.

1. Find the migrations Job. kubectl get job -lapp=migrations
2. Find the Pod being run by the Job. kubectl get pod -ljob-name=<job-name>
3. Examine the output, checking the STATUS column.

If the STATUS is Running, continue. If the STATUS is Completed, the application containers should start shortly after the next check passes.

Examine the logs from this pod. kubectl logs <pod-name>

Any failures during the run of this job should be addressed. These will block the use of the application until resolved. Possible problems are:

• Unreachable or failed authentication to the configured PostgreSQL database
• Unreachable or failed authentication to the configured Redis services
• Failure to reach a Gitaly instance

Applying configuration changes

The following command will perform the neccessary operations to apply any updates made to gitlab.yaml:

helm upgrade <release name> <chart path> -f gitlab.yaml

Included GitLab Runner failing to register

This can happen when the runner registration token has been changed in GitLab. (This often happens after you have restored a backup)

1. Find the new shared runner token located on the admin/runners webpage of your GitLab installation.

2. Find the name of existing runner token Secret stored in Kubernetes

   kubectl get secrets | grep gitlab-runner-secret
   

3. Delete the existing secret

   kubectl delete secret <runner-secret-name>
   

4. Create the new secret with two keys, (runner-regisration-token with your shared token, and an empty runner-token)

   kubectl create secret generic <runner-secret-name> --from-literal=runner-registration-token=<new-shared-runner-token> --from-literal=runner-token=""
   

Too many redirects

This can happen when you have TLS termination before the NGINX Ingress, and the tls-secrets are specified in the configuration.

1. Update your values to set global.ingress.annotations."nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/ssl-redirect": "false"

   Via a values file:

   # values.yml
   global:
     ingress:
       annotations:
         "nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/ssl-redirect": "false"
   

   Via the Helm CLI:

   helm ... --set-string global.ingress.annotations."nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/ssl-redirect"=false
   

2. Apply the change

NOTE: When using an external service for SSL termination, that service is responsible for redirecting to https (if so desired).

Upgrades fail with Immutable Field Error

spec.clusterIP

Prior to the 3.0.0 release of these charts, the spec.clusterIP property had been populated into several Services despite having no actual value (""). This was a bug, and causes problems with Helm 3’s three-way merge of properties.

Once the chart was deployed with Helm 3, there would be no possible upgrade path unless one collected the clusterIP properties from the various Services and populated those into the values provided to Helm, or the affected services are removed from Kubernetes.

The 3.0.0 release of this chart corrected this error, but it requires manual correction.

This can be solved by simply removing all of the affected services.

1. Remove all affected services:

   kubectl delete services -lrelease=RELEASE_NAME
   

2. Perform an upgrade via Helm.
3. Future upgrades will not face this error.

spec.selector

Sidekiq pods did not receive a unique selector prior to chart release 3.0.0. The problems with this were documented in.

Upgrades to 3.0.0 using Helm will automatically delete the old Sidekiq deployments and create new ones by appending -v1 to the name of the Sidekiq Deployments,HPAs, and Pods.

If you continue to run into this error on the Sidekiq deployment when installing 3.0.0, resolve these with the following steps:

1. Remove Sidekiq services

   kubectl delete deployment --cascade -lrelease=RELEASE_NAME,app=sidekiq
   

2. Perform an upgrade via Helm.