Set up external dependencies for local development

The bundled PostgreSQL, Redis, and MinIO charts have been deprecated and were removed in GitLab 19.0. Use scripts/dev_dependencies.sh to quickly provision externally managed replacements (CloudNativePG, Valkey, and Garage) in your cluster.

For migrating an existing installation, see Migrate from the bundled Redis, PostgreSQL, and MinIO charts.

Prerequisites

• A running local Kubernetes cluster: k3s, KinD, or minikube
• kubectl connected to your cluster
• helm v4 or later (required by the Garage installation, which uses the helm-git plugin with --verify support)
• Approximately 2 CPU cores, 4 GiB of memory, and 12 GiB of persistent storage

helm repo remove garage
bash scripts/dev_dependencies.sh setup

See Environment setup for tool installation guidance.

Quick start

1. From the root of the chart repository, run:

   bash scripts/dev_dependencies.sh setup

   To use a different namespace:

   NAMESPACE=my-namespace bash scripts/dev_dependencies.sh setup

2. Deploy the GitLab chart with the generated values file:

   helm dependency update
   helm upgrade --install gitlab . \
     --namespace gitlab \
     --timeout 600s \
     -f .values/dev-external.values.yaml \
     --set global.hosts.domain=<YOUR_DOMAIN> \
     --set global.hosts.externalIP=<YOUR_IP> \
     --set certmanager-issuer.email=<YOUR_EMAIL>

   .values/dev-external.values.yaml is generated by the setup script and is gitignored.

What the script does

1. Valkey - deploys a standalone instance with authentication and a 2 GiB persistent volume. A random password is auto-generated and stored in a Kubernetes Secret on first run; subsequent runs reuse the existing secret.
2. CloudNativePG - installs the operator (namespace-scoped) and creates a single-instance PostgreSQL cluster with the gitlabhq_production database.
3. Garage - installs the object storage service, creates the GitLab buckets, and writes three Kubernetes Secrets (gitlab-object-storage, gitlab-object-storage-s3cmd, gitlab-registry-storage).
4. Values file - writes .values/dev-external.values.yaml with connection settings for all three services.

Managing the setup

Check status:

bash scripts/dev_dependencies.sh status

Remove the external dependencies (does not affect the GitLab chart release):

bash scripts/dev_dependencies.sh teardown

Remove the GitLab chart release as well:

helm uninstall gitlab --namespace gitlab

Configuration

Further reading

• External Redis/Valkey configuration
• External PostgreSQL configuration
• External object storage configuration