Administrator documentation (FREE SELF)

If you use GitLab.com, only GitLab team members have access to administration tools and settings. If you use a self-managed GitLab instance, learn how to administer it.

Only administrator users can access GitLab administration tools and settings.

Available distributions

GitLab has two product distributions available through different subscriptions:

• The open source GitLab Community Edition (CE).
• The open core GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE).

You can install either GitLab CE or GitLab EE. However, the features you have access to depend on your chosen subscription.

GitLab Community Edition installations have access only to Free features.

Installing and maintaining GitLab

Learn how to install, configure, update, and maintain your GitLab instance.

Installing GitLab

• Install: Requirements, directory structures, and installation methods.
• Reference architectures: Add additional resources to support more users.
• Installing GitLab on Amazon Web Services (AWS): Set up GitLab on Amazon AWS.
• Geo: Replicate your GitLab instance to other geographic locations as a read-only fully operational version.
• Disaster Recovery: Quickly fail-over to a different site with minimal effort in a disaster situation.
• Add License: Add a license at install time to unlock features that are in paid tiers of GitLab.

Configuring GitLab

• Adjust your instance's time zone: Customize the default time zone of GitLab.
• System hooks: Notifications when users, projects and keys are changed.
• Security: Learn what you can do to further secure your GitLab instance.
• Usage statistics, version check, and Service Ping: Enable or disable information about your instance to be sent to GitLab, Inc.
• Global user settings: Configure instance-wide user permissions.
• Polling: Configure how often the GitLab UI polls for updates.
• GitLab Pages configuration: Enable and configure GitLab Pages.
• GitLab Pages configuration for GitLab source installations: Enable and configure GitLab Pages on source installations.
• Uploads administration: Configure GitLab uploads storage.
• Environment variables: Supported environment variables that can be used to override their default values to configure GitLab.
• File hooks: With custom file hooks, GitLab administrators can introduce custom integrations without modifying GitLab source code.
• Enforcing Terms of Service
• Customer experience improvement and third-party offers
• Compliance: A collection of features from across the application that you may configure to help ensure that your GitLab instance and DevOps workflow meet compliance standards.
• Diff limits: Configure the diff rendering size limits of branch comparison pages.
• Merge request diffs storage: Configure merge requests diffs external storage.
• Broadcast Messages: Send messages to GitLab users through the UI.
• Elasticsearch: Enable Elasticsearch to empower Advanced Search. Use when you deal with a huge amount of data.
• External Classification Policy Authorization
• Add a license: Add a license to unlock features that are in paid tiers of GitLab.
• Admin Area: for self-managed instance-wide configuration and maintenance.
• S/MIME Signing: how to sign all outgoing notification emails with S/MIME.
• Enabling and disabling features flags: how to enable and disable GitLab features deployed behind feature flags.
• Application settings cache expiry interval
• Database Load Balancing: Distribute database queries among multiple database servers.
• Omnibus support for log forwarding.

Customizing GitLab appearance

• Header logo: Change the logo on all pages and email headers.
• Favicon: Change the default favicon to your own logo.
• Branded login page: Customize the login page with your own logo, title, and description.
• "New Project" page: Customize the text to be displayed on the page that opens whenever your users create a new project.
• Additional custom email text: Add additional custom text to emails sent from GitLab.

Maintaining GitLab

• Rake tasks: Perform various tasks for maintenance, backups, automatic webhooks setup, and more.
  • Backup and restore: Backup and restore your GitLab instance.
• Operations: Keeping GitLab up and running (clean up Redis sessions, moving repositories, Sidekiq MemoryKiller, Puma).
• Restart GitLab: Learn how to restart GitLab and its components.
• Invalidate Markdown cache: Invalidate any cached Markdown.
• Instance review: Request a free review of your GitLab instance.

Updating GitLab

• GitLab versions and maintenance policy: Understand GitLab versions and releases (Major, Minor, Patch, Security), as well as update recommendations.
• GitLab in maintenance mode: Put GitLab in maintenance mode.
• Update GitLab: Update guides to upgrade your installation to a new version.
• Upgrading without downtime: Upgrade to a newer major, minor, or patch version of GitLab without taking your GitLab instance offline.

Upgrading or downgrading GitLab

• Upgrade from GitLab CE to GitLab EE: Learn how to upgrade GitLab Community Edition to GitLab Enterprise Editions.
• Downgrade from GitLab EE to GitLab CE: Learn how to downgrade GitLab Enterprise Editions to Community Edition.

GitLab platform integrations

• Mattermost: Integrate with Mattermost, an open source, private cloud workplace for web messaging.
• PlantUML: Create diagrams in AsciiDoc and Markdown documents created in snippets, wikis, and repositories.
• Web terminals: Provide terminal access to your applications deployed to Kubernetes from GitLab CI/CD environments.

User settings and permissions

• Creating users: Create users manually or through authentication integrations.
• Libravatar: Use Libravatar instead of Gravatar for user avatars.
• Sign-up restrictions: block email addresses of specific domains, or allow only specific domains.
• Access restrictions: Define which Git access protocols can be used to talk to GitLab (SSH, HTTP, HTTPS).
• Authentication and Authorization: Configure external authentication with LDAP, SAML, CAS, and additional providers.
  • Sync LDAP
  • Kerberos authentication
  • See also other authentication topics (for example, enforcing 2FA).
• Email users: Email GitLab users from GitLab.
• User Cohorts: Display the monthly cohorts of new users and their activities over time.
• Audit events: View the changes made on the GitLab server for:
  • Groups and projects.
  • Instances.
• Auditor users: Users with read-only access to all projects, groups, and other resources on the GitLab instance.
• Incoming email: Configure incoming emails to allow users to reply by email, create issues by email and merge requests by email, and to enable Service Desk.
  • Postfix for incoming email: Set up a basic Postfix mail server with IMAP authentication on Ubuntu for incoming emails.
• Abuse reports: View and resolve abuse reports from your users.
• Credentials Inventory: With Credentials inventory, GitLab administrators can keep track of the credentials used by their users in their GitLab self-managed instance.

Project settings

• Issue closing pattern: Customize how to close an issue from commit messages.
• Gitaly: Configuring Gitaly, the Git repository storage service for GitLab.
• Default labels: Create labels that are automatically added to every new project.
• Restrict the use of public or internal projects: Restrict the use of visibility levels for users when they create a project or a snippet.
• Custom project templates: Configure a set of projects to be used as custom templates when creating a new project.

Package Registry administration

• Container Registry: Configure GitLab to act as a registry for containers.
• Package Registry: Enable GitLab to act as a registry for packages.
• Dependency Proxy: Configure the Dependency Proxy, a local proxy for frequently used upstream images/packages.

Repository settings

• Repository checks: Check your repository for data corruption.
• Repository storage paths: Manage the paths used to store repositories.
• Repository storage types: Information about the different repository storage types.
• Repository storage Rake tasks: A collection of Rake tasks to list and migrate existing projects and attachments associated with it from Legacy storage to Hashed storage.
• Limit repository size: Set a hard limit for your repositories' size.
• Static objects external storage: Set external storage for static objects in a repository.

CI/CD settings

• Enable or disable GitLab CI/CD: Set new projects in your instance to have GitLab CI/CD enabled or disabled by default.
• GitLab CI/CD administration settings: Enable or disable Auto DevOps site-wide and define the artifacts' max size and expiration time.
• External Pipeline Validation: Enable, disable, and configure external pipeline validation.
• Job artifacts: Enable, disable, and configure job artifacts (a set of files and directories which are outputted by a job when it completes successfully).
• Job logs: Information about the job logs.
• Register runners: Learn how to register and configure runners.
• Shared runners quota of CI/CD minutes: Limit the usage of CI/CD minutes for shared runners.
• Enable or disable Auto DevOps: Enable or disable Auto DevOps for your instance.

Snippet settings

• Setting snippet content size limit: Set a maximum content size limit for snippets.

Wiki settings

• Setting wiki page content size limit: Set a maximum content size limit for wiki pages.

Git configuration options

• Server hooks: Server hooks (on the file system) for when webhooks aren't enough.
• Git LFS configuration: Learn how to configure LFS for GitLab.
• Housekeeping: Keep your Git repositories tidy and fast.
• Configuring Git Protocol v2: Git protocol version 2 support.

Monitoring GitLab

• Monitoring GitLab:
  • Monitoring uptime: Check the server status using the health check endpoint.
  • IP allowlist: Monitor endpoints that provide health check information when probed.
  • Monitoring GitHub imports: The GitLab GitHub Importer displays Prometheus metrics to monitor the health and progress of the importer.

Performance Monitoring

• GitLab Performance Monitoring:
  • Enable Performance Monitoring: Enable GitLab Performance Monitoring.
  • GitLab performance monitoring with Prometheus: Configure GitLab and Prometheus for measuring performance metrics.
  • GitLab performance monitoring with Grafana: Configure GitLab to visualize time series metrics through graphs and dashboards.
  • Performance Bar: Get performance information for the current page.

Troubleshooting

• Log system: Where to look for logs.
• Sidekiq Troubleshooting: Debug when Sidekiq appears hung and is not processing jobs.
• Troubleshooting Elasticsearch
• Navigating GitLab via Rails console
• GitLab application limits
• Responding to security incidents

Support Team Documentation

The GitLab Support Team has collected a lot of information about troubleshooting GitLab. The following documents are used by the Support Team or by customers with direct guidance from a Support Team member. GitLab administrators may find the information useful for troubleshooting. However, if you are experiencing trouble with your GitLab instance, you should check your support options before referring to these documents.

WARNING: The commands in the following documentation might result in data loss or other damage to a GitLab instance. They should be used only by experienced administrators who are aware of the risks.

• Diagnostics tools
• Linux commands
• Troubleshooting Kubernetes
• Troubleshooting PostgreSQL
• Guide to test environments (for Support Engineers)
• GitLab Rails console commands (for Support Engineers)
• Troubleshooting SSL
• Related links:
  • GitLab Developer Documentation
  • Repairing and recovering broken Git repositories
  • Testing with OpenSSL
  • strace zine
• GitLab.com-specific resources:
  • Group SAML/SCIM setup