Upgrading from a non-Omnibus installation to an Omnibus installation

Upgrading from non-Omnibus installations has not been tested by GitLab.com.

Please be advised that you lose your settings in files such as gitlab.yml, puma.rb and smtp_settings.rb. You will have to configure those settings in /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb.

Upgrading from non-Omnibus PostgreSQL to an Omnibus installation using a backup

Upgrade by creating a backup from the non-Omnibus install and restoring this in the Omnibus installation. Ensure you are using exactly equal versions of GitLab (for example 6.7.3) when you do this. You might have to upgrade your non-Omnibus installation before creating the backup to achieve this.

After upgrading make sure that you run the check task: 

sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:check

If you receive an error similar to No such file or directory @ realpath_rec - /home/git, run this one liner to fix the Git hooks path: 

find . -lname /home/git/gitlab-shell/hooks -exec sh -c 'ln -snf /opt/gitlab/embedded/service/gitlab-shell/hooks $0' {} \;

This assumes that gitlab-shell is located in /home/git.

Upgrading from non-Omnibus PostgreSQL to an Omnibus installation in-place

It is also possible to upgrade a source GitLab installation to Omnibus GitLab in-place. Below we assume you are using PostgreSQL on Ubuntu, and that you have an Omnibus GitLab package matching your current GitLab version. We also assume that your source installation of GitLab uses all the default paths and users.

First, stop and disable GitLab, Redis and NGINX. 

# Ubuntu
sudo service gitlab stop
sudo update-rc.d gitlab disable

sudo service nginx stop
sudo update-rc.d nginx disable

sudo service redis-server stop
sudo update-rc.d redis-server disable

If you are using a configuration management system to manage GitLab on your server, remember to also disable GitLab and its related services there. Also note that in the following steps, the existing home directory of the Git user (/home/git) will be changed to /var/opt/gitlab.

Next, create a gitlab.rb file for your new setup: 

sudo mkdir /etc/gitlab
sudo tee -a /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb <<'EOF'
# Use your own GitLab URL here
external_url 'http://gitlab.example.com'

# We assume your repositories are in /home/git/repositories (default for source installs)
git_data_dirs({ 'default' => { 'path' => '/home/git' } })

# Re-use the PostgreSQL that is already running on your system
postgresql['enable'] = false
# This db_host setting is for Debian PostgreSQL packages
gitlab_rails['db_host'] = '/var/run/postgresql/'
gitlab_rails['db_port'] = 5432
# We assume you called the GitLab DB user 'git'
gitlab_rails['db_username'] = 'git'
EOF

Now install the Omnibus GitLab package and reconfigure it: 

sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure

You are not done yet! The gitlab-ctl reconfigure run has changed the home directory of the Git user, so OpenSSH can no longer find its authorized_keys file. Rebuild the keys file with the following command: 

sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:shell:setup

You should now have HTTP and SSH access to your GitLab server with the repositories and users that were there before.

If you can log into the GitLab web interface, the next step is to reboot your server to make sure none of the old services interferes with Omnibus GitLab.

If you are using special features such as LDAP you will have to put your settings in gitlab.rb, see the settings docs.

Upgrading from non-Omnibus MySQL to an Omnibus installation (version 6.8+)

Starting with GitLab 12.1, PostgreSQL is the only support database management system. So, if your non-Omnibus installation is running a GitLab version before 12.1 and is using MySQL, you will have to migrate to PostgreSQL before upgrading to 12.1.

To convert to PostgreSQL and use the built-in server, follow the steps: