Introduction

I am one of the winners of a brand new Raspberry Pi 4B https://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-93093/l/announcing-our-raspberry-pi-4-giveaway-winners . My project proposal was to try running a Gitlab server https://about.gitlab.com/ on the Pi. Gitlab is much more than just source code management tool (based on Git, of course). It also includes a project management and a ticket system and continuous improvement / continuous delivery (CI/CD) support. There are two options to run this application – hosted or installed on-premise. Both installation variants have currently four versions. The basic is always free, the other versions are paid, but more feature-rich. I know Gitlab as a user from my work, but I haven’t paid attention to the installation details until recently, when I saw that there is a package for the Raspberry Pi. Is it possible to run such a complex tool on the Pi? Let’s find out...

First Impressions

I know there are and will be many reviews, tests and benchmarks of the new Pi 4 on the internet, but I can’t resist writing a few sentences about the Pi itself.

I receiver just the Pi, so I immediately had to buy the rest of the necessary stuff: power supply, SD card, microHDMI cable, cooling accessories etc.

Here comes the first difference – new power supply is connected via a USB-C connector and the specification says 3 Amps are needed (old supply used microUSB and supplied 2.5 Amps). I bought the original one and had no doubts it will work. I also tried a non-original microUSB adapter (which could supply up to 3 Amps) and a microUSB<>USB-C adapter. This setup also worked.

I found some older Kinston SDHC 8 GB Class 10 card at home. Later I decided to do some performance comparision. I chose microSD card according to this benchmark: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2019/raspberry-pi-microsd-card-performance-comparison-2019

One of the cheapest, but also most powerful cards was SanDisk Micro SDHC Extreme 32GB 100MB/s A1 UHS-I U3 V30. As it turned out later, there is a huge difference in SD cards performance!

After reading a few reviews, I already knew there is no point in putting the Pi into a solid enclosure (especially the original one), so I currently run a bare board. The idle temperature is about 55 Centigrade and gets to ca. 65 during non-intensive work. I haven’t applied a heat-sink yet, but I have one prepared for future use. And a 4 x 4 cm fan if it won’t be enough.

Basic setup

I don’t want to go into much detail in this part, there is a ton of information about the basic setup.

1. Prepare SD card with a Raspbian image. I chose Raspbian Buster with desktop (but not all the software) https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/
2. Boot the Pi, finish the setup process.
3. Update the Pi (if not performed in the previous step) https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/raspbian/updating.md
4. Change the default’s user credentials, enable SSH / VNC or other form of a remote access.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/remote-access/ssh/

https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/remote-access/vnc/

If your VNC server doesn’t always start automatically, there is a known issue with a solution: https://help.realvnc.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021693151-VNC-Server-does-not-start-on-Raspberry-Pi-unless-a-mouse-keyboard-are-connected

My plan is running the Pi as a server, without keyboard, mouse, display.

Gitlab setup

Gitlab developers recommend downloading and installing an Omnibus package of Gitlab as the fastest and easiest option. There is also a manual for installing Gitlab on a Raspberry Pi, but at the time of writing this blog post, it worked only for Pi 2/3/4 running Raspbian based on Debian Stretch. However, current version of Raspbian is based on Debian Buster.

curl -Lo gitlab-ce_12.2.5-ce.0_armhf.deb https://packages.gitlab.com/gitlab/raspberry-pi2/packages/raspbian/stretch/gitlab-ce_12.2.5-ce.0_armhf.deb/download.deb

Now install the downloaded package:

sudo apt install ./gitlab-ce_12.2.5-ce.0_armhf.deb

Note: in the beginning, if you search for a package using a keyword “gitlab” in Raspbian, you get a few community built packages, but not the official “gitlab-ce” package as described above!

Now let’s get back to a gitlab-ce package installation. The installation took almost 2 minutes (10 minutes with an older card!) and as you can see in the previous screenshot, consumed almost 1800 MB.

sudo nano /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb

I skipped the recommended Pi-specific changes (creating swap, reducing the number of concurrent processes, optionally creating ZRAM swap) and started a recofiguration.

sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure

The reconfiguration took 7 minutes.

By the way, it took 27 minutes with the old SD card and threw some Grafana error.

Here comes the default page for the administrator: