Gitlab Omnibus important directories

I’m just experimenting with running Gitlab in a Linux Container (LXD, using CE Ombibus 13.10.3-ce.0 at the moment in a Debian Buster container). It appears to work and it was easy to install it.

I’d just like to confirm where the important data resides that needs to be saved if the container is to be dropped and recreated. From my experiments, I have the following two directories:

/etc/gitlab
/var/opt

I have successfully rebuilt a new container, placing those two directories into it before installing Gitlab. The only difference to a new install appears to be that it says it isn’t configured and it doesn’t run the configure task. So I run “gitlab-ctl reconfigure” and everything then seems to work fine.

I just want to check if I have missed anything ?

Two other important directories are:

• /opt/gitlab (binaries and services)
• /var/log/gitlab (logs)

If I’m rebuilding container by doing a clean install then I shouldn’t need to worry about /opt/gitlab because that’s put in place by installing the omnibus package, right? Are you saying I can avoid the need to reinstall the package by saving /opt/gitlab as well ?

Logs, good point, if I want to preserve the logs then I’ll need that directory also.

I have done some tests - creating a new container, mapping pre-populated /etc/gitlab and /var/opt/gitlab into it and then installing the Debian Omnibus package and everything that I’ve tried appears to be working as expected.