Re: [gentoo-user] Gitlab experiences

[Jeremi Piotrowski]

On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 03:19:00PM +0200, Ralf wrote:
> Hi James,
>
> On 07/13/16 14:44, James wrote:
> >
> > Has anyone attempted to install a self hosted gitlab  on gentoo server(s)?
> > A small gentoo cluster/container setup? Using a Distributed File System,
> > like cephfs, orangefs or other DFS?
> I recommend to deploy gitlab inside a Debian LXC/Docker container as
> Gitlab guys provide and maintain precompiled .deb packages. You do not
> want to compile it on your own as it comes with a load of dependencies.
> And once dependencies change you really might run into trouble with
> gentoo. Gitlab isn't just a tiny one-click-and-it-runs webservice, it's
> a whole ecosystem.

I would deploy it with docker. The gitlab guys push official images of the
main gitlab app[1] and CI runners[2] to dockerhub. That should be
the easiest path to getting it up and running in no time.

That being said, gitlab does not really play well with clustering in
general. I don't think the main part of the app does any kind of
horizontal scaling (gitlab.com is hosted on a single server) so you need a
fairly beefy server. And while storage should be entirely up to you (the
app _should_ be indifferent to what you use) most folks appear to run with
local disks or NFS.


> >
> > Any experiences with gitlab are most welcome for comment, good or bad.
> Yes. Bad. Slow, unreactive, eats tons of resources. Doesn't scale with
> large repos (except you have unlimited access to hardware resources). A
> Linux kernel git mirror finally crashed it.

I can second that - it's slow and load times are long even when performing
the most basic operations such as opening a small file or viewing a single
commit (you _will_ notice - it regulary takes several seconds). Mind you
the gitlab folks are working on improving this since several releases.

As a user, another issue I have with it is that the merge request/review
interface is just terrible. There is _no_ merge request versioning, so
either you submit your code in perfect shape at first try, or any change
(amending/rebasing/merging) will cause the changelist to be duplicated
many times over. You also lose track of the review history instantly - old
comments are either concealed or swallowed.

There is also no CLI utility to automate common review-related tasks
(submitting/responding to review) so you are forced to do everything over
the slow WebUI.

If you care at all about the codereview aspects, I would recommend gerrit
or phabricator. Both have cli utilities (git-review and arcanist) and while
some claim they are ugly (heard that one especially about gerrit) they are
100x more practical. 

If you only care about having a repository browser then gitlab can work
but there are simpler apps out there (gogs/pagure).


[1]: https://hub.docker.com/r/gitlab/gitlab-ce/
[2]: https://hub.docker.com/r/gitlab/gitlab-runner/