A self-managed gitlab instance on my laptop.

I was curious about how can I host a gitlab instance on my own.

Testing Services

• GitLab Instance (of course)
• GitLab Runner
• GitLab CI/CD

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Some Notes for me

Starting point -

export GITLAB_HOME=$(pwd)
docker compose up -d

Check the GitLab instance is healthy -

docker-compose exec gitlab /bin/bash -c "gitlab-ctl status"

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Configuration of the gitlab instance for the first time

Getting the root password

docker exec -it gitlab-ce cat /etc/initial_root_password

Sign in @ git.localhost

username: root
password: ***

Changing the admin credentials

• Change the username root to something else
• Change the password to something else

Create a new project whatever

...

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Register a Gitlab Runner:

docker exec -it gitlab-runner gitlab-runner register

gitlab-ce is the container_name of the gitlab instance - see in compose file #L8

host: http://gitlab-ce

Two types of tokens for runners

• Shared runner
• Project-specific runner

token: token

Runner name: anything

you will need to use these tags in your job stages

tags: whatever

description: whatever

executor: docker

See the services tag in gitlab-ci.yml

I am going to use dind (docker in docker) so set the image

docker-image: docker:20.10.16

We are using DIND so we need to set the flags

• privileged (runner will get full access to the repository)
• network_mode (to see gitlab-instance from gitlab-runner DIND)

Otherwise, CI will fail like this

privileged = true

network_mode = "gitlab-network"

see in compose file #L38 ci-file

After registering the runner, you need to set the var privileged = false

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Container Registry

Check to login into the registry

docker login -u {username} -p {password} registry.git.localhost

CI PASSING