gitlab-ctl problems on ubuntu 14.04
I have been trying to uninstall an old, unused gitlab installation and install a new up-to-date one on Ubuntu 14.04. I don't think gitlab-ctl works reliably on ubuntu. gitlab-ctl for 7.x neither uninstalled nor cleansed correctly (as far as I can see those were no-ops I had to manually kill all of the gitlab-related processes and delete all the gitlab files in order to clean the system enough to make the new install successful.
In the gitlab-ctl for 8.x, 'stop' leaves a bunch of svlogd processes running. This is not really satisfactory. If there is another gitlab-ctl option that really stops everything, it needs to be documented better and highlighted.
gitlab-ctl reconfigure tries to use useradd, which work very very slowly on Ubuntu 14.04, and times out, so the reconfigure fails (adduser is the recommended tool)
The best workaround is to create the following /etc/passwd
entries before gitlab-ctl reconfigure is run for the first time
git:x:127:136:git version control,,,:/var/opt/gitlab:/bin/sh
gitlab-www:x:999:999::/var/opt/gitlab/nginx:/bin/false
gitlab-redis:x:998:998::/var/opt/gitlab/redis:/bin/nologin
gitlab-psql:x:997:997::/var/opt/gitlab/postgresql:/bin/sh