Gitlab 11 migration to newer versions

Hello community,

I have a GitLab (v 11.0.3) installed on a Debian 8.11 jessie server. As you can imagine this is a pretty old installation.
Updating these seem a bit tricky - there are many intermediate versions.

My question is: do you thing migrating the repositories to a newly deployed server (like Debian 10 or Ubuntu 20.04) and a newly installed GitLab (higher/last version) would work?

Or the only way is to update everything: server + GitLab?
It would be already great if I can at least move it to a newly deployed server, with the same Git version.

Thank you!

Your best bet would be upgrade as far as you can go on Debian 8.11 with Gitlab which would be 13.3.9 as per this link:

your upgrade path as per the docs: Upgrading GitLab | GitLab

11.11.8 → 12.0.12 → 12.1.17 → 12.10.14 → 13.0.14 → 13.1.11

then go from 13.1.11 to 13.3.9.

Once you are on 13.3.9, you could then make a Gitlab backup. Then install a new version of Debian 10 or Ubuntu 20.04 and then install on this Gitlab 13.3.9 for Ubuntu 20.04. Copy the /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb from your old installation along with the gitlab-secrets.json file to the new server and run gitlab-ctl reconfigure. Then copy the backup from /var/opt/gitlab/backups from your old server to the same location on the new server and run the restore. More info on backup/restore here: Back up and restore GitLab | GitLab

Thank you for the feedback and for the links! I was thinking about this option too. I will consult the documentation

Just make sure which version you are using gitlab-ce or gitlab-ee as the links I gave were for ce

Good point. I checked. It is Community Edition. Thank you!

Hi again,

Just wanted to thank you for the advice. I managed to migrate the GitLab to its latest version.