Environment Variables

GitLab exposes certain environment variables which can be used to override their defaults values.

People usually configure GitLab via /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb for Omnibus installations, or gitlab.yml for installations from source.

Below you will find the supported environment variables which you can use to override certain values.

Supported environment variables

Variable Type Description
ENABLE_BOOTSNAP string Enables Bootsnap for speeding up initial Rails boot (1 to enable)
GITLAB_CDN_HOST string Sets the base URL for a CDN to serve static assets (e.g. //mycdnsubdomain.fictional-cdn.com)
GITLAB_ROOT_PASSWORD string Sets the password for the root user on installation
GITLAB_HOST string The full URL of the GitLab server (including http:// or https://)
RAILS_ENV string The Rails environment; can be one of production, development, staging or test
DATABASE_URL string The database URL; is of the form: postgresql://localhost/blog_development
GITLAB_EMAIL_FROM string The e-mail address used in the “From” field in e-mails sent by GitLab
GITLAB_EMAIL_DISPLAY_NAME string The name used in the “From” field in e-mails sent by GitLab
GITLAB_EMAIL_REPLY_TO string The e-mail address used in the “Reply-To” field in e-mails sent by GitLab
GITLAB_EMAIL_SUBJECT_SUFFIX string The e-mail subject suffix used in e-mails sent by GitLab
GITLAB_UNICORN_MEMORY_MIN integer The minimum memory threshold (in bytes) for the Unicorn worker killer
GITLAB_UNICORN_MEMORY_MAX integer The maximum memory threshold (in bytes) for the Unicorn worker killer
GITLAB_SHARED_RUNNERS_REGISTRATION_TOKEN string Sets the initial registration token used for GitLab Runners

Complete database variables

The recommended way of specifying your database connection information is to set the DATABASE_URL environment variable. This variable only holds connection information (adapter, database, username, password, host and port), but not behavior information (encoding, pool). If you don’t want to use DATABASE_URL and/or want to set database behavior information, you will have to either:

  • copy our template file: cp config/database.yml.env config/database.yml, or
  • set a value for some GITLAB_DATABASE_XXX variables

The list of GITLAB_DATABASE_XXX variables that you can set is:

Variable Default value Overridden by DATABASE_URL?
GITLAB_DATABASE_ADAPTER postgresql Yes
GITLAB_DATABASE_DATABASE gitlab_#{ENV['RAILS_ENV'] Yes
GITLAB_DATABASE_USERNAME root Yes
GITLAB_DATABASE_PASSWORD None Yes
GITLAB_DATABASE_HOST localhost Yes
GITLAB_DATABASE_PORT 5432 Yes
GITLAB_DATABASE_ENCODING unicode No
GITLAB_DATABASE_POOL 10 No

Adding more variables

We welcome merge requests to make more settings configurable via variables. Please make changes in the config/initializers/1_settings.rb file and stick to the naming scheme GITLAB_#{name in 1_settings.rb in upper case}.

Omnibus configuration

To set environment variables, follow these instructions.

It’s possible to preconfigure the GitLab Docker image by adding the environment variable GITLAB_OMNIBUS_CONFIG to the docker run command. For more information see the Pre-configure Docker container section in the Omnibus documentation.