Run your own Git server with GitLab

By far, the most widely used modern version control system in the world today is Git. Having a distributed architecture, Git is an example of a DVCS (Distributed Version Control System). Rather than having only one single place for the full version history of the software as is common in once-popular version control systems like CVS or Subversion (also known as SVN), in Git, every developer’s working copy of the code is also a repository that can contain the full history of all changes.

In addition to being distributed, Git has been designed with performance, security and flexibility in mind.

In this tutorial we are going to talk about setting up a Git server Using GitLab Community Edition (it’s free), and for this I used a fully patched Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server running on a VPS.

Step 1 : Install Git on your server

You can install Git from the packages already available via the repos or your distros, or you can do it manually.

sudo apt-get install git-core

Step 2 : Install GitLab

GitLab is an open source project which allows users to run a project management system similar to GitHub on their own servers. You can use GitLab to run a service similar to GitHub for your team members or your company. You can use GitLab to work on private projects before releasing them for public contributions.

Before we install GitLab, you may want to configure an SMTP email server so that GitLab can push emails as and when needed. They recommend Postfix. So, install Postfix on your server.

sudo apt-get install postfixk
sudo dpkg-reconfigure postfix

Now download GitLab package file

wget https://downloads-packages.s3.amazonaws.com/ubuntu-14.04/gitlab-ce_7.10.4~omnibus-1_amd64.deb (Download latest package file with respect to you system environment from here https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/archives)

Install and Configure

sudo dpkg -i gitlab-ce_7.10.4~omnibus-1_amd64.deb
sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure

You now need to configure the domain name in the configuration file so you can access GitLab.

sudo nano /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb

In this file edit the ‘external_url’ and give the server domain. Save the file and then open the newly created GitLab site from a web browser. By default it creates ‘root’ as the system admin and uses ‘5iveL!fe’ as the password. Log into the GitLab site and then change the password.

Now you are ready to go, log into the site and start managing your project. GitLab is overflowing with features and options.