Setting custom environment variables

If necessary you can set custom environment variables to be used by Puma, Sidekiq, Rails and Rake via /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb. This can be useful in situations where you need to use a proxy to access the internet and need to clone externally hosted repositories directly into GitLab. In /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb supply a gitlab_rails['env'] with a hash value. For example:

gitlab_rails['env'] = {
    "http_proxy" => "http://<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>@example.com:8080",
    "https_proxy" => "http://<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>@example.com:8080"
#    "no_proxy" => ".yourdomain.com"  # Wildcard syntax if you need your internal domain to bypass proxy. Do not specify a port.
}

You can also override environment variables from other GitLab components which might be required if you are behind a proxy:

# Needed for proxying Git clones
gitaly['env'] = {
    "http_proxy" => "http://<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>@example.com:8080",
    "https_proxy" => "http://<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>@example.com:8080"
}

gitlab_workhorse['env'] = {
    "http_proxy" => "http://<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>@example.com:8080",
    "https_proxy" => "http://<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>@example.com:8080"
}

gitlab_pages['env'] = {
    "http_proxy" => "http://<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>@example.com:8080",
    "https_proxy" => "http://<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>@example.com:8080"
}

# If you use the docker registry
registry['env'] = {
    "http_proxy" => "http://<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>@example.com:8080",
    "https_proxy" => "http://<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>@example.com:8080"
}

GitLab will attempt to use HTTP Basic Authentication when a username and password is included in the proxy URL.

Proxy settings use the . syntax for globing.

Proxy URL values should generally be http:// only, unless your proxy has its own SSL certificate and SSL enabled. This means, even for the https_proxy value, you should usually specify a value as http://<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>@example.com:8080.

Applying the changes

Any change made to the environment variables requires a reconfigure for it to take effect.

Perform a reconfigure:

sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure

Noteworthy environment variables

TMPDIR

Ruby and other components use the TMPDIR environment variable to determine where to store temporary files. By default, this is /tmp.

You may need to configure a custom temporary directory if:

• Your /tmp is mounted as tmpfs with limited space.
• Large files (such as LFS objects or CI artifacts) cause /tmp to fill up.
• Geo secondary sites run out of space in /tmp during object storage replication.

To configure a custom temporary directory:

1. Create the directory and set permissions:

   sudo mkdir -p /var/opt/gitlab/tmp
   sudo chown git:git /var/opt/gitlab/tmp
   sudo chmod 700 /var/opt/gitlab/tmp

2. Edit /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb:

   gitlab_rails['env'] = { 'TMPDIR' => '/var/opt/gitlab/tmp' }

3. Reconfigure and restart GitLab:

   sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure
   sudo gitlab-ctl restart

4. Verify the setting:

   sudo gitlab-rails runner "puts ENV['TMPDIR']"

   The output should display your configured path.

Troubleshooting

An environment variable is not being set

Check that you don’t have multiple entries for the same ['env']. The last one will override previous entries. In this example, NTP_HOST will not be set:

gitlab_rails['env'] = { 'NTP_HOST' => "<DOMAIN_OF_NTP_SERVICE>" }

gitlab_rails['env'] = {
    "http_proxy" => "http://<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>@example.com:8080",
    "https_proxy" => "http://<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>@example.com:8080"
}

Error: Connection reset by peer when mirroring repositories

If the no_proxy value includes port numbers in the URLs, it may cause DNS resolution failures. Remove any port numbers from the no_proxy URLs to resolve this issue.