Oracle Linux – Install Gitlab on Oracle Linux

Even though Oracle is providing the option to use GIT from within the Oracle Developer Cloud service there are situations where you do want to use your own GIT installation. For example situations where you need a local on premise installation for storing information in GIT where you are not allowed to store to information outside of the organization datacenter. Or, in situations where you need the additional level of freedom to undertake specific actions which are not always allowed by the Oracle Developer Cloud Service.

In effect GIT will be, just GIT, without a graphical user interface and additional functionality which makes live much more easy for developers and administrators. One of the solutions which would be fitting for deploying your own GIT repository on Oracle Linux with a full and rich set of options and a graphical user interface in the form of a web interface is GitLab.

GitLab functionality
When adopting GitLab you will get a lot more functionality opposed to “just” running git on your server. To name a couple of the features that will be introduced by GitLab see the below examples:

• Organize your repositories into private, internal or public projects
• Manage access and permissions with different user roles and settings for internal and external users
• Create Websites for your GitLab projects, groups and users
• Unlimited public and private repos, create a new repo for even the smallest projects
• Import existing projects from GitHub, BitBucket, Google Code, Fogbugz, or any git repo with a URL.
• Protected branches, control read/write permissions to specific branches.
• Keep your documentation within the project using GitLab’s built-in wiki system.
• Collect and share reusable code with code Snippets
• Control GitLab with a set of powerful APIs.

As you can see from the image above, GitLab will provide you a full web GUI to use by administrators as well as end-users in your organization.

Install GitLab on Oracle Linux
Installation of  GitLab on Oracle Linux is relative easy. Assuming you have a standard Oracle Linux 6 installation available for deplying GitLab the below steps should be undertaken to ensure you have a full working GitLab environment.

Make sure you have the dependencies installed on your system. This can be done with the below commands:

sudo yum install curl openssh-server openssh-clients postfix cronie
sudo service postfix start
sudo chkconfig postfix on
sudo lokkit -s http -s ssh

Ensure that you have the GitLab YUM repository available so we can install GitLab with YUM.

curl -sS https://packages.gitlab.com/install/repositories/gitlab/gitlab-ce/script.rpm.sh | sudo bash
sudo yum install gitlab-ce

Now we can issue the reconfigure command to ensure that GitLab is configured fully for your specific host.

sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure

If all the steps are completed without any issue you will be able to navigate with a browser to your machine and access GitLab on the default port, which is port 80.