• Configuration
• Configuring backups
• Persistence configuration
  • Backup considerations
  • Restore considerations
• Toolbox included tools
  • affinity

Toolbox

The Toolbox Pod is used to execute periodic housekeeping tasks within the GitLab application. These tasks include backups, Sidekiq maintenance, and Rake tasks.

Configuration

The following configuration settings are the default settings provided by the Toolbox chart:

gitlab:
  ## doc/charts/gitlab/toolbox
  toolbox:
    enabled: true
    replicas: 1
    backups:
      cron:
        enabled: false
        concurrencyPolicy: Replace
        failedJobsHistoryLimit: 1
        schedule: "0 1 * * *"
        successfulJobsHistoryLimit: 3
        suspend: false
        backoffLimit: 6
        safeToEvict: false
        restartPolicy: "OnFailure"
        resources:
          requests:
            cpu: 50m
            memory: 350M
        persistence:
          enabled: false
          accessMode: ReadWriteOnce
          useGenericEphemeralVolume: false
          size: 10Gi
      objectStorage:
        backend: s3
        config: {}
    persistence:
      enabled: false
      accessMode: 'ReadWriteOnce'
      size: '10Gi'
    resources:
      requests:
        cpu: '50m'
        memory: '350M'
    securityContext:
      fsGroup: '1000'
      runAsUser: '1000'
      runAsGroup: '1000'
    containerSecurityContext:
      runAsUser: '1000'
    affinity: {}

Configuring backups

Information concerning configuring backups in the backup and restore documentation. Additional information about the technical implementation of how the backups are performed can be found in the backup and restore architecture documentation.]

Persistence configuration

The persistent stores for backups and restorations are configured separately. Please review the following considerations when configuring GitLab for backup and restore operations.

Backups use the backups.cron.persistence.* properties and restorations use the persistence.* properties. Further descriptions concerning the configuration of a persistence store will use just the final property key (e.g. .enabled or .size) and the appropriate prefix will need to be added.

The persistence stores are disabled by default, thus .enabled needs to be set to true for a backup or restoration of any appreciable size. In addition, either .storageClass needs to be specified for a PersistentVolume to be created by Kubernetes or a PersistentVolume needs to be manually created. If .storageClass is specified as ‘-‘, then the PersistentVolume will be created using the default StorageClass as specified in the Kubernetes cluster.

If the PersistentVolume is created manually, then the volume can be specified using the .volumeName property or by using the selector .matchLables / .matchExpressions properties.

In most cases the default value of .accessMode will provide adequate controls for only Toolbox accessing the PersistentVolumes. Please consult the documentation for the CSI driver installed in the Kubernetes cluster to ensure that the setting is correct.

Backup considerations

A backup operation needs an amount of disk space to hold the individual components that are being backed up before they are written to the backup object store. The amount of disk space depends on the following factors:

• Number of projects and the amount of data stored under each project
• Size of the PostgresSQL database (issues, MRs, etc.)
• Size of each object store backend

Once the rough size has been determined, the backups.cron.persistence.size property can be set so that backups can commence.

Restore considerations

During the restoration of a backup, the backup needs to be extracted to disk before the files are replaced on the running instance. The size of this restoration disk space is controlled by the persistence.size property. Be mindful that as the size of the GitLab installation grows the size of the restoration disk space also needs to grow accordingly. In most cases the size of the restoration disk space should be the same size as the backup disk space.

Toolbox included tools

The Toolbox container contains useful GitLab tools such as Rails console, Rake tasks, etc. These commands allow one to check the status of the database migrations, execute Rake tasks for administrative tasks, interact with the Rails console:

# locate the Toolbox pod
kubectl get pods -lapp=toolbox

# Launch a shell inside the pod
kubectl exec -it <Toolbox pod name> -- bash

# open Rails console
gitlab-rails console -e production

# execute a Rake task
gitlab-rake gitlab:env:info

affinity

For more information, see affinity.