My GitLab Setup

The purpose of this assignment is to set up a GitLab Server as if it were for a large-scale company.

My GitLab Server was setup in a personal PVE (Proxmox Virtual Environment) as a VM using Docker-Compose.

Installation Procedure

Setup an Ubuntu Server and install Docker & Docker-Compose

Follow this guide (official Docker installation guide)

and this guide (official Docker-Compose installation guide)
Note that after follwing the first guide Docker-Compose may already be installed.

Setup GitLab using Docker-Compose

Follow this guide

It is recommended to export the $GITLAB_HOME variable like this: export GITLAB_HOME=/srv/gitlab
and then adding this to .bashrc so you don't have to do it every time.
However, this didn't work for me, so I ended up hard-coding them in the docker-compose.yaml file.

I altered the docker-compose.yaml quite a lot from the one in the manual.
I switched to the Commuity Edition of GitLab, altered the hostname to something I may use, hard-coded the $GITLAB_HOME variable (because it wasn't working) and added grafana & prometheus.
My file:

version: '3.6'
services:
  web:
    image: 'gitlab/gitlab-ce:latest'
    restart: always
    container_name: gitlab
    hostname: 'localhost'
    environment:
      GITLAB_OMNIBUS_CONFIG: |
        external_url 'http://localhost:8929'
        prometheus_monitoring['enable'] = true
        prometheus['listen_address'] = 'localhost:9090'
        # Add any other gitlab.rb configuration here, each on its own line
    ports:
      - '8929:8929'
      - '9090:9090'
    volumes:
      - '/srv/gitlab/config:/etc/gitlab'
      - '/srv/gitlab/logs:/var/log/gitlab'
      - '/srv/gitlab/data:/var/opt/gitlab'
    shm_size: '1g'
  grafana:
    image: 'grafana/grafana'
    container_name: grafana
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - '3000:3000'
    volumes:
      - grafana-storage:/var/lib/grafana
volumes:
  grafana-storage: {}

Monitoring Solution

I used Prometheus (which comes preinstalled with GitLab) and Grafana as my monitoring solution.

For Grafana, follow this guide to set it up.
It used to come shipped with GitLab just like Prometheus, but was deprecated in 16.0 and removed in 16.3.
For this reason, I had to add it in as a separate container in the docker-compose.yml file.

Once I had my Grafana Container up and running, I imported the Prometheus Metrics by adding a connection to 192.168.1.212:9090 (My Prometheus).
When it comes to actually adding graphs / dashboards, I found that there are many premade ones here: https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/
Just download the JSON and import it into Grafana.

GitLab Runner Setup

For the GitLab Runner, I made a separate VM for resource management purposes.
Since nothing else is running on this VM, there is no need to use Docker-Compose.

Just like before, I used this guide to install Docker.
Then I proceeded to create a volume to store persistant data: docker volume create gitlab-runner-config

To run the GitLab Runner, use:

docker run -d --name gitlab-runner --restart always \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
    -v gitlab-runner-config:/etc/gitlab-runner \
    gitlab/gitlab-runner:alpine

Note that I am using the alpine image because it is more lightweight. The other option would be to use the latest tag which uses ubuntu.

Now we need to register this Runner.
In your GitLab Settings you can add a runner, which will enable you to generate an authentication token.
I ran this command on my Runner VM (setup in non-interactive mode):

docker run --rm -v /srv/gitlab-runner/config:/etc/gitlab-runner gitlab/gitlab-runner:alpine register \
  --non-interactive \
  --url "192.168.1.212" \
  --token "$RUNNER_TOKEN" \
  --executor "docker" \
  --docker-image alpine:latest \
  --description "docker-runner"

Then create a project with a CI-CD Pipeline and add the runner to the project.