Updating

GitLab releases updates to its Enterprise Edition software very regularly. A major upgrade is always released the 22nd of every month.

Please keep in mind the CSL upgrade guidelines for production systems when deciding whether to upgrade GitLab. When in doubt, ask someone more experienced and BACKUP DATA.

To perform an upgrade,

During an apt upgrade, GitLab performs a backup of the SQL database.

• Schedule a maintenance period

• Perform a backup of data either via a Ceph snapshot or gitlab-rake

  • gitlab-rake:

  As root on gitlab, run

  gitlab-rake gitlab:backup:create STRATEGY=copy

  to backup all repositories to /var/opt/gitlab/backups

  • Ceph snapshot:

  As root on a Ceph monitor, run the following to perform a snapshot of the Ceph image

  rbd snap create virtual-machines/gitlab@<SNAPSHOT NAME>

• Run the following to upgrade GitLab

apt update && apt upgrade -y

• The above upgrade will take time to perform. When the upgrade finishes, it should give you a success message. After the upgrade successfully completes, it will take a few minutes for all workers to start up so in that time frame you may see a 502 when accessing the site.

LDAP login may temporarily not work in the minutes after a login. This is fine. If more than 15 minutes have passed and GitLab is not working, perform debugging to fix the problem or rollback the upgrade as per the GitLab docs.