GitLab Development Kit

Configure and manage a GitLab development environment.

Overview

GitLab Development Kit (GDK) provides a collection of scripts and other resources to install and manage a GitLab installation for development purposes. The source code of GitLab is spread over multiple repositories and it requires Ruby, Go, Postgres/MySQL, Redis and more to run. GDK helps you install and configure all these different components, and start/stop them when you work on GitLab.

To start using GDK follow these three steps:

• Prepare your computer
• Install GDK
• Learn how to use GDK

Design goals

• Get the user started, do not try to take care of everything
• Run everything as your 'desktop' user on your development machine
• GitLab Development Kit itself does not run sudo commands
• It is OK to leave some things to the user (e.g. installing Ruby)

Differences with production

• gitlab-workhorse does not serve static files
• C compiler needed to run bundle install (not needed with Omnibus)
• GitLab can rewrite its program code and configuration data (read-only with Omnibus)
• 'Assets' (Javascript/CSS files) are generated on the fly (pre-compiled at build time with Omnibus)
• Gems (libraries) for development and functional testing get installed and loaded
• No unified configuration management for GitLab and gitlab-shell (handled by Omnibus)
• No privilege separation between Ruby, Postgres and Redis
• No easy upgrades
• Need to download and compile new gems ('bundle install') on each upgrade
• etc.

License

The GitLab Development Kit is distributed under the MIT license, see the LICENSE file.