Guidance on upgrading from 8.1.4 CE to latest

How to Use GitLab Upgrade
1

Hello there,

We have a very old GitLab Community Edition 8.1 and have been asked by the management to upgrade it to the latest version.

It is installed on RHEL 7.1 and omnibus installation. Since it is very old any guidance would be appreciated.

Also I could see the docs for upgrading from 8.x no longer exists.

https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/update/README.html#updating-from-gitlab-8-10-and-lower-to-8-11-or-newer

Thanks!

Thanks in advance!

2

Do you need data from the instance other than Git repository data? (e.g. like issues?)

If not, the easiest way to get your GitLab repo data on the latest version of GitLab will be to:

  1. install the latest version of GitLab on a separate system
  2. create new users on the new instance for each user on the old instance (use same username/email)
  3. migrate repositories from old instance to new instance using Import project from repository by URL
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3

Hello @gitlab-greg , thanks for your reply.

Approach seems to be sensible, only challenge we got is Jenkins.

We have close to 480+ repos out of which only 430+ are archived and 90+ repos are set to read/write.

These 90+ repos are in read/write and they have updates occasionally and also we have Jenkins which has jobs that pulls the repo.

Thanks again!

4

To set up Jenkins on the new instance, I suggest using the GitLab Jenkins integration.

You can set this up for multiple projects programatically via the Jenkins integration API.

I’m not familiar with Jenkins but for updates on the Jenkins side of things, perhaps you can keep the same group/project naming structure for imported projects and then update the “pull from” URLs in Jenkins with the new instance’s URL.

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