Disable and Remove Gitaly When Disk Full

Hi all!

I was combing through my hosted instance trying to figure out why I am out of space. It turned out that it was the @hashed gitaly repo. I saw in this post that I should disable gitaly, reconfigure, and run clean up.

Unfortunately I can’t do this as I lack the disk space to even edit and save gitlab.rb, let alone run rake. Assuming that I back up the server, is it “safe” to manually delete this repo, then run the steps mentioned in the post?

Thanks,
James

I wouldn’t recommend deleting it manually. Better option would be to restore to larger partitions than you currently have so that there is available disk space to run the commands as suggested in the link you found.

If you attempt to delete it manually without using the commands suggested, then potentially the risk for breaking your system further could be far higher. For example, you manually delete, and then gitlab services fail to start because it wants whatever was in the gitaly directory.

You could always test that though on a server to see if that will happen or not, but I wouldn’t do it on your existing server until you know for sure that it’s possible.

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I was finally able to move some disk space around enough to make changes to the server. I was able to disable gitaly and reconfigure, but then when I went to execute the rake command listed in the post I mentioned, it couldn’t find the command, asking if I meant gitlab:cleanup:moved instead.

Does my version not support the gitlab:cleanup:dirs command? I am running GitLab CE 13.12.10

Since that post is from 2018, then probably not. Gitaly is needed now anyway. Even on a single server: Configure Gitaly | GitLab

you can only disable it if you will have multiple servers, and you disable it locally on one of the Gitlab servers because it connects to another Gitaly instance. So if you have one server, then you need Gitaly on it for your repository storage. From this link: Gitaly and Gitaly Cluster | GitLab

Ah yup, late last night I realized that gitaly is a requirement. I also realized what my actual issue was. I thought the repo that was hogging all the disk space was something from gitaly, since the path listed in the config file pointed to a tmp path within the gitaly repository that no longer exists. It turned out to be a project created from a fork that had become bloated.

I have since removed that project since it was no longer necessary to keep around anyway. I did check the configs and other repos, and found that they also list similar temp-looking paths, so I do need to fix that issue. That is unrelated to this post though so I’ll go ahead and close it and mark your comment as the solution.

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