Make it possible to bypass automatic user/group management

As described in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/issues/722#note_1892519 :

• document the users and groups needed by omnibus-gitlab
• create a setting in gitlab.rb that tells 'gitlab-ctl reconfigure' to not try and create/modify users and groups, something like manage_users_groups false.

For most installations, automatically creating users and groups is the right behavior. But for 'corporate' environments with centrally managed user/group databases (LDAP, NIS etc.) it is a pain to trick omnibus-gitlab into not trying to create the user/group.

mentioned in issue #500 (closed)

mentioned in issue #722 (closed)

mentioned in issue #500 (closed)

Milestone changed to 8.0

This exact issue is preventing our team from using GitLab at the moment. Is there any work around aside from waiting for this feature to be added?

@shinhalsafar the only workaround is to tweak a lot of attributes in gitlab.rb (e.g. user['home'], user['uid']) until gitlab.rb reflects the actual situation. Chef (gitlab-ctl reconfigure) will then not try to change anything, because everything will look in order.

We have been recommending this approach to users for a long time but it sucks, and people sometimes (mostly? always?) just give up.

Thanks! Setting the following in /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb worked for me:

user['username'] = "git"
user['group'] = "git"
user['uid'] = 1040
user['gid'] = 1034
# # The shell for the git user
user['shell'] = "/bin/bash"
# # The home directory for the git user
user['home'] = "/var/home/git"

@jacobvosmaer that's incorrect, setting the uid's and gid's is the preferred action, it's not a workaround.

The problem is what happens on your system when those uid's and gid's already exist.

@LongLiveCHIEF I am all for locking down uids and gids. But if uids/gids are managed outside your GitLab server, e.g. in LDAP, I think it makes no sense to write down the numbers from LDAP in gitlab.rb.

mentioned in issue #708 (closed)

Reassigned to @marin

mentioned in merge request !467 (merged)

mentioned in merge request !467 (merged)

Status changed to closed by commit b7f5f2be

This should be available starting from 8.0 or you can try it out earlier from the nightly-builds repository where it will be available from tomorrow.