The Lost Notebook

gitlab (2)


Scaling Gitlab-CI Runners using AWS/EC2

I started working on this task a week ago. The setup is based on the write-up in https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/configuration/autoscale.html
Almost there …

What I previously had set up was a few persistent EC2 Spot requests for largish machines at half (more) the price. However, I felt (and heard complaints) that those were not enough at rush hour (when everyone and their cat wanted to push their code changes and test them). At the same time, even with Spot instances we had to pay for mostly unused servers for more than half the time. That felt like a huge waste for me and I know many feel the same.

Problems
* Get the right size instances for the right price
* Setup inside a VPC
* Use S3 for caching
* Use docker registry proxy (or setup the gitlab docker registry) for custom docker images used in CI jobs

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Tweaking GitLab Setup

What?

GitLab is your own GitHub and more (or less). They have pretty good introduction on the home page, so I won’t repeat that here.

The recommended installation method for GitLab is using the Omnibus package. Head to the downloads page and follow the instructions. You should have a GitLab setup in no time, who needs GitHub! oh well, many many people…

Now to the tweaks.

Why?

If you’re like me trying to hide the ports on your server from the bots and prying eyes, they you would have SSH on a different port and your other services all bound to localhost and facing the Internet bravely from behind a proxy server. I use Apache on my personal server, it’s pretty robust and gets the job done.

So let’s say SSH is on port 2022, and apache is taking firm hold on ports 80 and 443. So GitLab’s NGINX should take port 8088.

And the domain you’re using for gitlab is not the machine’s hostname, so hostname is ‘host4339.moodeef.com’ and gitlab’s URL is ‘gitlab.deeb.me’

How?

Edit the “/etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb” file with the following changes/additions:

gitlab_rails['gitlab_host'] = 'gitlab.deeb.me'
gitlab_rails['gitlab_ssh_host'] = 'gitlab.deeb.me'
gitlab_rails['gitlab_port'] = 8088
gitlab_rails['gitlab_email_from'] = 'git-no-reply@deeb.me'
gitlab_rails['gitlab_support_email'] = 'git-no-reply@deeb.me'
gitlab_rails['gitlab_shell_ssh_port'] = 2022
external_url = 'https://gitlab.deeb.me'

Then run gitlab-ctl reconfigure and see how it goes from there.

If things seem to be too complicated, you can always get a subscription option with full support from the GitLab folks. Or hire me to fix it for you!

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