How do we make GitLab more NFS-friendly?

It is not common but also not uncommon to run GitLab behind a load balancer with multiple GitLab servers and shared file storage, e.g. NFS. At the moment configuring the shared file storage part is messy and every release it seems to get worse.

We have shared files in:

• repositories
• uploads
• builds
• (soon) artifacts
• tmp/repositories
• tmp/rebase
• ... I probably missed something

Some of these paths are configurable in the application, some are not. Developers seem to randomly add new shared directories in each release, making it hard to keep documentation up to date, and making it hard for people running GitLab with NFS to update. What can we do about that?

cc @dzaporozhets @JobV

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Suggested rules

1. Every directory used for shared storage in GitLab is configurable
2. /home/git/gitlab/tmp is NOT shared storage: it contains sockets and pid files
3. ?

cc @jnijhof

As a basic rule, we should have:

Every directory used for shared storage in GitLab is configurable

If not, then it becomes a horrible mess of symlinks and NFS client mountpoints to run GitLab on NFS.

Another rule:

/home/git/gitlab/tmp is NOT shared storage: it contains sockets and pid files

Once all HTTP file uploads are accepted/served by gitlab-git-http-server we can consider creating Omnibus convenience settings, gitlab_data_dir, which will be a directory which stores repositories and uploads and authorized_keys and builds and artifacts and Git LFS objects etc, etc.

cc @marin

My comments above are just some ideas, there may be other ways to do things. But we have to do something about the current chaos and the work it creates for NFS-backed GitLab installations everywhere.

I like all the rules and ideas suggested above.

Put the rules in the issue body.

How do we disseminate this information to current and future GitLab developers? This is issue is not the way to do that.

Maybe we need a more technical-oriented developer handbook. It might be a good place for things like this and any other best practicies/quirks of the codebase we can think of.

@jacobvosmaer please add them to contributing.md, either directly or as a file storage guideline

Done in !1691 (merged)

Status changed to closed

mentioned in merge request omnibus-gitlab!568 (closed)

mentioned in merge request !14785