Is there a way to Install gitlab to different directory

How to Use GitLab
1

Hello,

Does gitlab support a way to specify the directory where it should be installed ?
or maybe is there a workaround for that ?

Thanks in advance

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2

Hi,

If using the omnibus packages, then this will default to /opt/gitlab for the binaries, and /var/opt/gitlab for the data. In /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb there are a load of entries for “/var/opt/gitlab” which you could potentially change to a different location. Whether you should or not is another thing.

The better way would be to mount /var/opt to the partition that you allocate a load of disk space to, and then install Gitlab at this point. That is what I would do.

I have experienced problems mounting a partition to /var/opt/gitlab, because then problems will occur when you attempt to delete Gitlab, since it cannot remove /var/opt/gitlab then as it will be a utilised mount point. I have had this with a test server, and thus this is why I recommend mounting to /var/opt instead. That way, when deleting in the future for example, /var/opt/gitlab will be deleted, but /var/opt as a mount point will remain.

I’ve never tried editing /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb to change the directories to something else other than /var/opt/gitlab, but I expect it would be highly problematic, if installing packages would by default be relying on this location. This is why I recommend using a mount point to /var/opt as the solution.

Technically you could compile from source, and I would expect you would have more flexibility then to choose where you want things to be built and installed.

3

Hi,

changing the default paths will make support more complicated, as it is not expected. I don’t recommend changing the layout, as it has proven to be reliable on upgrades and further maintenance. This runs through QA and ensures the packages & charts can be installed and trusted by many users.

What’s the reason to change the target directory?

Cheers,
Michael

4

I agree that it’s probably a bad idea.

But as source installs use different paths from omnibus install, I guess most features just work if you succeed. I’ve never tried doing a source install, but I imagine that would make changing paths easier. But it is a pretty bad reason to choose doing a source install.

I don’t know how other package managers do it, but with Debian packages (and I suspect it’s the same with others, but as said I don’t know them) you can’t change the paths the package uses on installation (those paths were chosen when the package was build).

But in almost all cases it’s a bad idea, and there are better ways (mounting a partition is a good example) of solving your real issue.

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