Nginx ipv6 problems

Some background: I set up an omnibus installation on a server that uses both ipv6 and ipv4 addresses and received an error report that it didn't work well for one user that is on ipv6. So was I, but it worked for me, but it might be that I fell back to ipv4 when the user did not.

Anyway, what I did to resolve it was first putting nginx['listen_address'] = "[::]" in gitlab.rb instead of having the default *. This however causes nginx not to bind to ipv4 in some cases. A solution for that is adding ipv6only=off to the listen directives.

Here is a demonstration of how I have solved this: https://gitlab.com/kode/omnibus-gitlab/commit/35d449932a1435511b3db422638e83530949e2de

It would be nice to get this functionality upstream so that I do not have to redo this manually every time I upgrade.

Thanks for trying out omnibus-gitlab with IPv6 @kode !

Looking very quickly at the NGINX docs, I wonder if perhaps we could allow for multiple listen statements via /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb. Then the user could explicitly instruct NGINX to listen on both '[::]' and '0.0.0.0'.

That would probably be possible as well, I assume it could be done like this:

<% @listen_addresses.each do |listen_address|
  puts "listen #{listen_address} #{@port}"
end %>

and having listen_addresses be an array. It'd probably break the configuration for a lot of people though, so maybe it'd be possible to make @listen_address the first element of such an array.

(As an aside, using multiple listens in one server block, http to https redirection can be done using something like

    if ($scheme = http) {
        return 301 https://<%= @fqdn %>$request_uri;
    }

but I think that's likely to interfere with using the ssl on directive for the whole server block instead of per listen directive)

I propose to keep the HTTP to HTTPS redirect as it is, and to use an array of listen addresses. We would have to preserve existing nginx['listen_address'] settings like you said, by appending them to the array, in libraries/gitlab.rb.

Milestone changed to 7.2

Fixed by !184 (merged).

Status changed to closed