Setting custom environment variables

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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
}

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.

note
DNS rebind protection is disabled when either the HTTP_PROXY or the HTTPS_PROXY environment variable is set, and the domain DNS can’t be resolved.

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

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"
}