Let’s face it,
In these crazy days of programs that span hundreds if not thousands of separate source files; keeping a track of just what changed where and when and which copy is actually the current one without any kind of source control can be a daunting task.
In comes source-control to the rescue, but it(GIT, SVN, Mercurial, etc..) isn’t very user friendly as is. Thus source control repositories with web-interfaces like BitBucket and GitHub have become very popular. These websites let you easily view changes in a graphically friendly environment as well as conduct merges, copies, forks, and various other handy source control operations with a click of a button.
The problem is that these services charge for the privilege of having a private repository, which protects your code from public viewing. That said, the bigger problem is that it is difficult to assure that your code isn’t being viewed from the service provider.
GitLab solves all these problems and adds CI functionality on top of it. Unfortunately GitLab is also quite the configuration monster when you attempt to use it without the bundled Ruby/Puma/Nginx, so we’ll have to proxy it instead of trying to run it directly through LSAPI (trust me I wasted a day going through the nightmare personally of trying to get it to work by manually installing the required ruby gems, setting the paths, etc.. it’s a hopeless cause)
Step 0:
You will need some way of running terminal commands on your machine, in this tutorial I use XSHELL but there are free alternatives such as putty.
First this tutorial assumes that you’ve already gone through the steps in my previous tutorial titled Installation and Configuration of OpenLiteSpeed with PHP, MariaDB, LetsEncrypt SSL, PHPMyAdmin, and NinjaFirewall on Debian 10 Buster
If you haven’t you can still follow the tutorial but note that there may be some divergence
Step 1:
We will need to download the package for our distribution of Linux. Luckily GitLab provides a repository installation script which handles a bunch of things for us, so lets grab that.
wget https://packages.gitlab.com/install/repositories/gitlab/gitlab-ce/script.deb.sh
We need to set the permission for this script to be executable first, so
chmod +x script.deb.sh
Now to add the repositories simply run the script
sudo bash ./script.deb.sh
Step 2:
Now lets install GitLab CE (Community Edition)
sudo apt-get install gitlab-ce
Step 3:
You may have noticed the error about GitLab not being able to detect a valid hostname, so lets configure the external URL
Open /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb with your text-editor of choice and make the following changes
First change
external_url 'http://gitlab.example.com'
To
external_url 'http://gitlab.yourwebsite.com:9191'
Optionally, you can change the default theme by UN-commenting this line
#gitlab_rails['gitlab_default_theme'] = 2
Now save and upload the file and run the following command to reconfigure GitLab
sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure
First run of this command took my machine almost 5 minutes to complete so let it run.
Step 4(OpenLiteSpeed):
Now we need to configure the VHOST for this GitLab installation to coincide with the subdomain we picked earlier
Login to OpenLitspeed and navigate to the VHOST Configuration (If you don’t know where this is check my earlier tutorial).
Click add to add a new Virtual Host
Fill in the following:
Click Save
Note: You may get an error saying the vhost.conf file doesn’t exist; click to create it and click save
Now you should have GitLab in the vhost list
Click to edit it
Now head over to the general tab and modify the document root
Change it to
$VH_ROOT/html
Also run the following commands and upload a test index.html page to the html/ directory
mkdir /var/www/gitlab/html chown lsadm:lsadm /var/www/gitlab/html
Next go to the Rewrite tab, Enable Rewrite and Auto Load from .htaccess
Next we need to point the subdomain to this vhost configuration before we configure SSL.
To do so go to the Listeners section and modify both HTTP and HTTPs Listeners
Create a new Virtual Host Mapping
Next if your primary website (yourwebsite.com) already has an SSL cert you can use that one (we will be modifying the certificate a bit later in order to add the subdomain). Otherwise you will have to generate a new cert (as is explained in my earlier tutorial).
Hit the refresh configuration button,
Next we need to adjust our DNS records accordingly to point to the new subdomain by adding an A record for that subdomain with the IP address of our server
Now we need to wait a while for the name-server records to update
Now we need to temporarily remove HSTS ( Strict Transport Security) on the main domain as it will force HTTPs but we haven’t extended our certificate yet
Its as simple as removing “includeSubDomains” and clearing your browser cache
After a while we should be able to visit gitlab.yourwebsite.com and see something
You’ll notice that the SSL won’t validate correctly if you don’t have a wildcard certificate
That means we will have to add the subdomain to the existing SSL certificate for it to be valid as well
Run the following command
certbot certonly --webroot -w /var/www/yourwebsite.com/html/ -d yourwebsite.com -d www.yourwebsite.com -w /var/www/gitlab/html/ -d gitlab.yourwebsite.com
Clear your browser’s cache, and refresh the OpenLiteSpeed configuration.
Now you can navigate back to the VHOST Configuration to force HTTPs
Ãdd the following Rewrite Rule
rewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on
rewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} !https
rewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [R,L]
Step 5:
We need to change some more settings in the GitLab.rb file to enable SSL
First, Disable LetsEncrypt (since we already generated a set of certificates for our webserver we don’t want GitLab trying to generate another)
Next, lets modify the External URL we setup at the beginning to point to HTTPS instead of HTTP
Change
external_url 'http://gitlab.yourwebsite.com:9191'
To
external_url 'https://gitlab.yourwebsite.com:9191'
Now, we need to symlink the existing certificates to the directory that GitLab expects them to be in
Your certificate and chain have been saved at: /etc/letsencrypt/live/website.com/fullchain.pem
Your key file has been saved at: /etc/letsencrypt/live/website.com/privkey.pem
GitLab expects these to be in /etc/gitlab/trusted-certs instead and named in the following format
gitlab.yourwebsite.com.crt gitlab.yourwebsite.com.key
Run the following commands
mkdir /etc/gitlab/trusted-certs/ ln -s /etc/letsencrypt/live/website.com/cert.pem /etc/gitlab/trusted-certs/gitlab.yourwebsite.com.crt ln -s /etc/letsencrypt/live/website.com/privkey.pem /etc/gitlab/trusted-certs/gitlab.yourwebsite.com.key chmod -R 755 /etc/gitlab/trusted-certs/ sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure
If you visit https://gitlab.yourwebsite.com:9191 you should now see the GitLab Installation
However this port 9191 business isn’t ideal, so lets proxy this connection
Step 6:
First go to the GitLab VHOST we created earlier, and under External App, we’re going to add our Nginx webserver
Fill in the following settings (note that we are looping back through the external address)
Next, create a new context proxy
Fill in the proxy context definition
Save and Refresh the configuration and you’re done!
Important directories to remember for GitLab
/var/log/gitlab /opt/gitlab /etc/gitlab
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