JiHu Edition

note
This section is only relevant if you are a customer in the Chinese market.

GitLab licensed its technology to a new independent Chinese company, called JiHu. This independent company will help drive adoption of the GitLab complete DevOps platform in China and foster the GitLab community and open source contributions.

For more information, see the blog post announcement and the FAQ.

Prerequisites

Before installing GitLab JiHu Edition, it is of critical importance to review the system requirements. The system requirements include details on the minimum hardware, software, database, and additional requirements to support GitLab.

Once you have contracted with JiHu, a JiHu representative will contact you to supply you with a license that you can use as part of the installation process.

Install or update a JiHu Edition package

note
If you are installing for the first time, you have to pass the EXTERNAL_URL="<GitLab URL>" variable to set your preferred domain name. Installation automatically configures and starts GitLab at that URL. Enabling HTTPS requires additional configuration to specify the certificates.

Please refer to the GitLab Jihu Edition Install page for more details on installing or updating a JiHu Edition package.

Set initial password and apply license

The first time GitLab JiHu Edition is installed, you are redirected to a password reset screen. Provide the password for the initial administrator account and you are redirected back to the login screen. Use the default account’s username root to log in.

For detailed instructions, see installation and configuration.

Additionally, you can navigate to the GitLab administration panel of your server and upload your JiHu Edition license file.

Update GitLab Enterprise Edition to JiHu Edition

To update an existing GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) server installed using the Omnibus GitLab packages to GitLab JiHu Edition (JH), you install the JiHu Edition (JH) package on top of EE.

The available options are:

  • (Recommended) Updating from the same version of EE to JH.
  • Updating from a lower version of EE to a higher version of JH, provided that this is a supported upgrade path (for example, EE 13.5.4 to JH 13.10.0).

In the following steps we assume that you are updating the same version (for example, EE 13.10.0 to JH 13.10.0).

To update EE to JH:

  • If you installed GitLab using a deb/rpm package:

    1. Take a backup.

    2. Find the currently installed GitLab version:

      For Debian/Ubuntu 

      sudo apt-cache policy gitlab-ee | grep Installed

      The output should be similar to Installed: 13.10.0-ee.0, so the installed version is 13.10.0-ee.0.

      For CentOS/RHEL 

      sudo rpm -q gitlab-ee

      The output should be similar to gitlab-ee-13.10.0-ee.0.el8.x86_64, so the installed version is 13.10.0-ee.0.

    3. Follow the same steps as when installing the JiHu Edition package for your operating system, and make sure to pick the same version as the one noted in the previous step. Replace <url> with the URL of your package.

    4. Reconfigure GitLab: 

      sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure

    5. Go to the GitLab administration panel of your server (/admin/license/new) and upload your JiHu Edition license file. If you have an EE license already installed prior to updating to JiHu, the EE license is automatically deactivated when JH is installed.

    6. Confirm that GitLab is working as expected, then remove the old Enterprise Edition repository:

      For Debian/Ubuntu 

      sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gitlab_gitlab-ee.list

      For CentOS/RHEL 

      sudo rm /etc/yum.repos.d/gitlab_gitlab-ee.repo
sudo dnf config-manager --disable gitlab_gitlab-ee

  • If you installed GitLab using Docker:

    1. Follow the Docker update guide and replace gitlab/gitlab-ee:latest with the following: 

      registry.gitlab.com/gitlab-jh/omnibus-gitlab/gitlab-jh:<version>

      Where <version> is the currently installed GitLab version, which you can find with: 

      sudo docker ps | grep gitlab/gitlab-ee | awk '{print $2}'

      The output should be similar to: gitlab/gitlab-ee:13.10.0-ee.0, so in this case, <version> equals to 13.10.0.

    2. Go to the GitLab administration panel of your server (/admin/license/new) and upload your JiHu Edition license file. If you have an EE license already installed prior to updating to JiHu, the EE license is automatically deactivated when JH is installed.

That’s it! You can now use GitLab JiHu Edition! To update to a newer version, see Install or update a JiHu Package.

Go back to GitLab Enterprise Edition

To downgrade the JiHu Edition installation to GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE), install the same version of the Enterprise Edition package on top of the currently installed one.

Depending on the preferred installation method for GitLab EE, either: