Running on a Raspberry Pi
In order to run GitLab Community Edition on a Raspberry Pi, you need the newest Pi 4 with at least 4GB of RAM for best results. You might be able to run GitLab on lower resources, like a Pi 2 or newer, but it is not recommended. We do not package for older Pis, as their CPU and RAM are insufficient.
The only supported architecture is armhf. For arm64 support, see
this epic.
Configure Swap
Even with a newer Pi, the first setting you will want to change is to ensure the device has enough memory available by expanding the swap space to 4GB.
On Raspbian, swap can be configured in /etc/dphys-swapfile.
See the manpage for available settings.
Install GitLab
The recommended and supported way to install GitLab is by using the GitLab official repository.
Only the official Raspberry Pi distribution is supported.
Install GitLab via the official repository
Visit the installation page, choose Raspberry Pi OS, and follow the instructions to install GitLab.
Manually download GitLab
If your distribution of choice is other than Raspbian, but Debian-based, you can manually download GitLab and install it.
Reduce running processes
If you find that your Pi is struggling to run GitLab, you can reduce some running processes:
-
Open
/etc/gitlab/gitlab.rband change the following settings:# Reduce the number of running workers to the minimum in order to reduce memory usage puma['worker_processes'] = 2 sidekiq['concurrency'] = 9 # Turn off monitoring to reduce idle cpu and disk usage prometheus_monitoring['enable'] = false -
Reconfigure GitLab:
sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure
Additional recommendations
You can boost GitLab performance with a few settings.
Use a proper harddrive
GitLab will perform best if you mount /var/opt/gitlab and the swapfile from a
hard drive rather than the SD card. You can attach an external hard drive to the
Pi using the USB interface.
Use external services
You can improve the GitLab performance on the Pi by connecting GitLab to external database and Redis instances.