How to install GitLab on Windows

GitLab installation on Windows is pretty easy. You just need a Virtual machine running Linux

In all seriousness this is something that will probably never be supported. Thanks for visiting this page though, hope you at least smiled :slight_smile:

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I read the title and I’m thinking who would ever spend their time trying? I especially thought that after doing the manual install. Debian VMs (with not graphical interface) work quite well with Windows hosts even in 32-bit and low memory.

Here’s what is possible to run on Windows:

  • Nginx
  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • Ruby
  • SSL
  • SSH (with BitVise or some other server)
  • make (from Visual Studio)
  • git
  • services

Here’s what’s not possible to run on Windows:

  • Redis (you could use the really old version that Microsoft “said” they would maintain, but it’s not worth it)
  • GitLab as a whole

So it’s really not far off… But I can’t see any advantages of running any type of server on Windows that is compatible with Linux. Linux uses less resources altogether, doesn’t get viruses like Windows does, and doesn’t need any unnecessary software (like drivers) to get it up and running.

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You can use the GitHub program :v

According to the new feature of Windows 10 (i mean Linux’s Bash shell based on windows) is it Possible help the Developers to run GitLab on Windows without using Virtual Machine or container?

Thanks in advance

That’s true! Is this in current versions of Windows 10?

Oh, I see it’s there already http://www.howtogeek.com/265900/everything-you-can-do-with-windows-10s-new-bash-shell/.

Cool! Will need to check this out :slight_smile:

I got itchy to try this :stuck_out_tongue:

So, GitLab installed, but failed at reconfigure. Upstart seems to be the culprit, but I didn’t investigate further. Maybe there’s a better chance to work if you use the source installation.

The CLI works perfectly. I think the app / graphical solution wont work because the linux subsystem doesn’t have video (X11) capabilities within windows. CLI only.

Note: You must have the anniversary update or be in the developer preview early update program to have the linux subsystem option even appear.

  1. Go in and enabled the “linux subsystem on windows” under “programs and features” --> “turn windows features on or off”
  2. Open “Bash” (search from the start menu) and let it do it’s guided install of “Ubuntu on Windows”
  3. Run “Ubuntu On Windows” (again use the windows start menu to find it)
  4. Install Git with “sudo apt-get install git”.
  5. Profit.

At this point you can just treat it as you would a linux system and it all works flawlessly.

Installing Gitlab on a Windows 10 “bash” prompt is a pretty terrible idea, but kudos to anyone brave (or silly) enough to even try it.

The most likely problems:

  1. Installing and running things with a lot of services, which get orchestrated using tools like chef and puppet. There are no system level services, there is no systemd or daemon/service-manager infrastructure. Gitlab requires a lot of services to be up to work. I notice that I can run services --status-all on my windows system. I notice that it tells me that rsync exists as a service. I can start it and it will lie to me (complete without error) but there is still no rsync service on my box. If something as easy as RSYNC won’t run, there’s no way that the suite of Gitlab Server services is going to run.

  2. Installing the Gitlab Omnibus (from say, Ubuntu private package archives) will NOT work. The results will not be functional.

  3. Even if you could ever get the system UP for a few minutes, you’d find it all goes back down next time you reboot, or breaks every time you apt-get upgrade, and getting it going again won’t be any fun. Giant waste of your time.

  4. Gitlab is intended to boot when the system boots, this is not possible to implement with WSL at this time. It doesn’t seem it’s possible to set a service or group of related services to auto-start.

If anyone actually has any questions on setting up a VM, I am happy to try to answer as I have lots of experience now.

If people are interested in just downloading a working “demo scale” Ubuntu or Debian VM for Hyper-V let me know and if enough people want to see that I’ll see what I can do.

Yeah, my shot was more like a fun thing to try. I never had any hopes of getting this working :slight_smile:

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If you want to try it again, I would try installing rvm (ruby version manager) into WSL, then go language, then get the gitlab-development-kit (a gem, gem install gitlab-development-kit) and follow the instructions here:

Probably won’t work either, but will be educational.

I’ve put over 40 hrs into trying to get this working, I had to stop before bad things happened.

You might be able to get the Docker Container of GItlab-Omnibus on Docker for Windows, but I don’t recommend that either. There are weird issues.

At that point you may as well just fire up VirtualBox or Vagrant Up an ubuntu box, and go with it.

The short answer, do not run GitLab on windows (ubuntu on gitlab etc.), i will be very unstable if you get it to work. Use Ubuntu OS (or something like that), it’s easy to setup and it works just fine!

Sorry about late contribution…

I can put it to work in Windows 10 …

But, i am wondering, which one of the 3 would be best:
Method 1. Using the Community Source with Windows Platform (without Linux subsystem on Windows).
Method 2. Using the Ubuntu integrated with Windows 10.
Method 3. Put VHD for Hyper-V.

I already have a Windows up and running with almost 86% of the items we require.

I have seen someone try in earnest to run GitLab (via the GDK, rather than omnibus) using WSL.

Unfortunately, WSL doesn’t support a range of UNIX features that we depend on. From memory, we ran into particular problems with UNIX sockets. There is some support, but it’s not complete, and we depend on the missing features: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2017/12/19/af_unix-comes-to-windows/

Overall, @axil’s suggestion from three years ago still seems to be the best idea.

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You can’t use it on WSL ( Windows Subsystem Linux) as this bash/ubuntu is missing core features. With the last release you can now run daemons services like nginx but not docker that require more access to lower level networking & kernel features. It’s not a full linux system so don’t try to push it beyond that. Also why do a developer need to run a FULL gitlab on it’s own workstation? May be for testing, then use virtualbox/vmware/hyperv beside that it will be totally loss of time.

If you want to install the gitlab into the Windows 10 then you have to download the compatible ms outlook support gitlab for the Windows 10

guys is this still considered a bad idea? I only have a windows 10 machine but I need to evaluate gitlab for my team. This is where I’m at: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52191568/installing-gitlab-on-ubuntu-18-on-windows-10