In this article, I will describe all the steps required to setup GitLab CI/CD in kuberntes using kustomize.
We will go through how to run GitLab on Kubernetes when you have related resources postgres, redis, minio, tls certificates etc already available in your setup.
This is a very common scenario in companies and also for self-hosting that you are already using these services in your environment and prefer to use the same for gitlab.
The all in one production installation may be easily performed with Helm. You can refer to official documentation from gitlab if that is your requirement.
You will need the following in order to run gitlab.
container registry, gitlab backups, terraform storage backend, gitlab artifacts etc.repository data data on disk, for that your kubernetes cluster must have a way of provisioning storage. You can install local path provisioner in your cluster for dynamically provisioning volumes.Info: You can swap minio with any other object storage i.e S3 by changing connection info secret
When installing gitlab with helm it generates the configmaps after rendering the templates with parameters, we can manually change these values in configmaps but its a hassle and not convenient.
To make this process easy we will use a tool called subvars which will let us render these values from command line. Install it by following the instructions on github page, we will use it later.
.git folder afterwards as it creates issues some times when rendering multiple version of the same file with subvars.export RELEASE_VER=1.0
wget -q https://github.com/kha7iq/gitlab-k8s/archive/refs/tags/v${RELEASE_VER}.tar.gz
tar -xf v${RELEASE_VER}.tar.gz
cd gitlab-k8s-${RELEASE_VER}
patch: |-
- op: replace
path: /spec/rules/0/host
value: your-gitlab-url.example.com
- op: replace
path: /spec/tls/0/hosts/0
value: your-gitlab-url.example.com
- op: replace
path: /spec/tls/0/secretName
value: example-com-wildcard-secret
minio-conn-secret containing configuration for minio. It will be used for all the enabled S3 buckets except gitlab backups, we will create that separately. Input the information as per your setup and create the kubernetes secret.cat << EOF > minio.config
provider: AWS
region: us-east-1
aws_access_key_id: 4wsd6c468c0974006d
aws_secret_access_key: 5d5e6c468c0974006cdb41bc4ac2ba0d
aws_signature_version: 4
host: minio.example.com
endpoint: "https://minio.example.com"
path_style: true
EOF
kubectl create secret generic minio-conn-secret \
--from-file=connection=minio.config --dry-run=client -o yaml >minio-connection-secret.yml
cat << EOF > storage.config
[default]
access_key = be59435b326e8b0eaa
secret_key = 6e0a10bd2253910e1657a21fd1690088
bucket_location = us-east-1
host_base = https://minio.example.com
host_bucket = https://minio.example.com/gitlab-backups
use_https = True
default_mime_type = binary/octet-stream
enable_multipart = True
multipart_max_chunks = 10000
multipart_chunk_size_mb = 128
recursive = True
recv_chunk = 65536
send_chunk = 65536
server_side_encryption = False
signature_v2 = True
socket_timeout = 300
use_mime_magic = False
verbosity = WARNING
website_endpoint = https://minio.example.com
EOF
kubectl create secret generic storage-config --from-file=config=storage.config \
--dry-run=client -o yaml > secrets/storage-config.yml
All other secrets can be used as is from repository or you can change all of them following gitlab documentation
One of the most important secret is gitlab-rails-secret, in case of a disaster where you have to restore gitlab from a backup you must apply the same secret in your cluster as these keys will be used to decrypt the database etc from backup. Make sure you keep this consistent after first install.
We reached the last part, Its alot of work to change database and other parameters one by one in configmaps.
I have implemented some templating for this which can provide all the values vi environment variables and render the manifests with subvars, it will output these to destination folder and replace all the parameters defined as go templates.
The values are self explanatory, GITLAB_GITALY_STORAGE_SIZE variable is used to specify how much storage is needed for gitaly and GITLAB_STORAGE_CLASS is the name of storage class.
GITLAB_URL=gitlab.example.com \
GITLAB_REGISTRY_URL=registry.example.com \
GITLAB_PAGES_URL=pages.example.com \
GITLAB_POSTGRES_HOST=192.168.1.90 \
GITLAB_POSTGRES_PORT=5432 \
GITLAB_POSTGRES_USER=gitlab \
GITLAB_POSTGRES_DB_NAME=gitlabhq_production \
GITLAB_REDIS_HOST=192.168.1.91:6379 \
GITLAB_GITALY_STORAGE_SIZE=15Gi \
GITLAB_STORAGE_CLASS=local-path \
subvars dir --input gitlab-k8s-1.0 --out dirName
Change into dirName/gitlab-k8s-1.0 you can have a look to confirm if everything is in order before applying this in cluster.
gitlab and build with kustomize or kubectl. I prefer kustomize but you can also use kubectl with -k flag.kubectl create namespace gitlab
kustomize build gitlab-k8s-1.0/ | kubectl apply -f -
# or following if you have already changed into directory
kustomize build . | kubectl apply -f -
# With kubectl
kubectl apply -k gitlab-k8s-1.0/
# or following if you have already changed into directory
kubectl apply -k .
https://gitlab.example.com and login.Gitlab ‘root’ user’s password configured as secret
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Postgres password configured as secret
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