Moving from a server with a manual install of 7.6.0 to another server with Omnibus install of 7.11.2

How to Use GitLab
2

First of all welcome!

Since you are using postgres and the version is not that old, I’d say the upgrade path is fairly easy. The docs surely need an update.

I responded to a similar issue here. For your case I would follow these steps.

  1. Download omnibus 7.6.0 from the archives
  2. Install it on the new server and run sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure at least once.
  3. Backup the manual install.
  4. Transfer that backup file to /var/opt/gitlab/backups on the new server
  5. On the new server run the restore process
  6. Edit gitlab.rb to match gitlab.yml
  7. Run gitlab-ctl reconfigure and test that everything works
  8. Take a backup with sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:backup:create just in case
  9. Upgrade to latest version of omnibus first manually invoking dpkg or yum, then install the package server script so that the updates in the future are as easy as updating the server.

If the above works, then schedule a downtime window to properly take a backup with the db unmodified from new transactions. You can use the broadcast message feature (admin/broadcast_messages) to notify the users.

As for the gitlab.yml -> gitlab.rb, there is a script in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/blob/master/support/gitlab_yml_converter.rb that does the heavy work. Just bare in mind that some settings might have been transfered to the admin area. For a full list of options see gitlab.rb.template.

Good luck :v: