Pages under a single domain with namespaceInPath not working

How to Use GitLab Self-managed
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Problem to solve

Hello world!
I have a on-premise, bare-metal kubernetes cluster on which I’m running Gitlab CE v17.11.2. I’ve installed it using helm (chart version 8.11.2). I want to enable gitlab pages without setting up a wildcard DNS domain, and I’m running into issues.

I have a group (group) with a repo (repo), which lives under git.example.com/group/repo. I want their pages to live under pages.example.com/group/repo.

My gitlab installation is reachable under https://git.example.com; I want my gitlab pages to live under https://pages.example.com. I have set up DNS A records for these (pointing to the same IP, at which a k8s Gateway is listening). I have HttpRoutes (rather than ingresses!) set up. git.example.com routes to the gitlab-webservice-default:8080 service; pages.example.com routes to the gitlab-gitlab-pages:8090 service. I’m reasonably sure these routes are working as intended.

Relevant Helm values

These are the relevant helm values. I installed gitlab using helm upgrade -n gitlab gitlab gitlab/gitlab --version=8.11.2 -f gitlab-values.yaml

global:
    hosts:
        https: true
        pages:
            names: pages.example.com
    pages:
        enabled: true
        namespaceInPath: true
        accessControl: false
gitlab:
    pages:
        logVerbose: true

Repo config

There is a CI job to build the pages (actually, just grab the html files from the public folder):

image: busybox

pages:
  stage: deploy
  script:
  - echo 'Nothing to do...'
  artifacts:
    paths:
    - public
    expire_in: 1 day
  rules:
    - if: $CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME == $CI_DEFAULT_BRANCH

This seems to work: It kicks off a pipeline in which the pages job finishes pretty much instantly. It then starts a pages:deploy, which also finishes successfully.

Pages logs

In the web UI, under deploy/pages it happily asks me whether I would like to use a unique domain (if yes, it generates https://pages.example.com/repo-4d6c12; if no https://pages.example.com/group/repo). However, for both it gives me a 404.
The pages logs say the following

{"content_type":"text/html; charset=utf-8","correlation_id":"90a7613a-4707-450e-855f-8f4fa14b2f27","duration_ms":0,"host":"group.pages.example.com","level":"info","method":"GET","msg":"access","pages_https":true,"proto":"HTTP/1.1","read_bytes":1622,"referrer":"","remote_addr":"192.168.1.4","remote_ip":"192.168.1.4","status":302,"system":"http","time":"2025-07-07T16:06:53+02:00","ttfb_ms":0,"uri":"/repo", "user_agent":"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/138.0.0.0 Safari/537.36","written_bytes":65}
{"content_type":"text/html; charset=utf-8","correlation_id":"6293844f-22bb-438f-aae8-a84060193b87","duration_ms":0,"host":"group.pages.example.com","level":"info","method":"GET","msg":"access","pages_https":true,"proto":"HTTP/1.1","read_bytes":1623,"referrer":"","remote_addr":"192.168.1.4","remote_ip":"192.168.1.4","status":404,"system":"http","time":"2025-07-07T16:06:53+02:00","ttfb_ms":0,"uri":"/repo/","user_agent":"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/138.0.0.0 Safari/537.36","written_bytes":3725}

Note that it’s looking for the domain group.pages.example.com, which indeed does not exist.

Versions

Please add an x whether options apply, and add the version information.

  • Self-managed
  • GitLab.com SaaS
  • Dedicated

Versions

  • GitLab: 17.11.2

Everything I could find so far indicates that setting namespaceInPath: true does what I need to, but it doesn’t seem to actually work.
Any help or advice would be much appreciated. I’d also be happy to provide more config details upon request.

2

Ok, user error. There needs to be a home.html or index.html file :man_facepalming: