Configure the GitLab chart with external GitLab Pages

This document intends to provide documentation on how to configure this Helm chart with a GitLab Pages instance, configured outside of the cluster using a Linux package. Issue 418259 proposes adding documentation for a Linux package instance with an external GitLab Pages using the Helm chart.

Requirements

  1. External Object Storage, as recommended for production instances, should be used.
  2. Base64 encoded form of a 32-bytes-long API secret key for Pages to interact with GitLab Pages.

Known limitations

  1. GitLab Pages Access Control is not supported out of the box.

Configure external GitLab Pages instance

  1. Install GitLab using the Linux package.

  2. Edit /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb file and replace its contents with the following snippet. Update the values below to match your configuration: 

    roles ['pages_role']

# Root domain where Pages will be served.
pages_external_url '<Pages root domain>'  # Example: 'http://pages.example.io'

# Information regarding GitLab instance
gitlab_pages['gitlab_server'] = '<GitLab URL>'  # Example: 'https://gitlab.example.com'
gitlab_pages['api_secret_key'] = '<Base64 encoded form of API secret key>'

  3. Apply the changes by running sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure.

Configure the chart

  1. Create a bucket named gitlab-pages in the object storage for storing Pages deployments.

  2. Create a secret gitlab-pages-api-key with the Base64 encoded form of API secret key as value. 

    kubectl create secret generic gitlab-pages-api-key --from-literal="shared_secret=<Base 64 encoded API Secret Key>"

  3. Refer the following configuration snippet and add necessary entries to your values file. 

    global:
  pages:
    path: '/srv/gitlab/shared/pages'
    host: <Pages root domain>
    port: '80'  # Set to 443 if Pages is served over HTTPS
    https: false  # Set to true if Pages is served over HTTPS
    artifactsServer: true
    objectStore:
      enabled: true
      bucket: 'gitlab-pages'
    apiSecret:
      secret: gitlab-pages-api-key
      key: shared_secret
  extraEnv:
    PAGES_UPDATE_LEGACY_STORAGE: true  # Bypass automatic disabling of disk storage
    note
    By setting PAGES_UPDATE_LEGACY_STORAGE environment variable to true, the feature flag pages_update_legacy_storage is enabled which deploys Pages to local disk. When you migrate to object storage, do remember to remove this variable.

  4. Deploy the chart using this configuration.