Documentation

How this buildpacks works:

Gitlab is per default not a 12 factor app and won't really run on heroku because it has an ephemeral filesystem. But there are alternatives to heroku like dokku which make it possible to both have persistent storage and being able to deploy code via git push.

This buildpack needs to be run via the buildpack-multi buildpack with the .buildpacks file containing:

buildpack-gitlab buildpack-ruby

The buildpack-gitlab will

• install the required packages
• install gitlab-shell (version can be specified via GITLAB_SHELL_VERSION)
• patch both gitlabhq and gitlab-shell to be more 12 factor app like (e.g. read the environment variables REDIS_URL and SMTP_URL)
• add sshd to Procfile

while the heroku-buildpack-ruby will

• install the required ruby gems for gitlabhq
• write config/database.yml to read from DATABASE_URL