alt Hacker NewsTo all of those proposing self-hosted GitLab: we did it for 6+ years in my company, and it's not always a smooth sailing. We had our own runners and we made it auto-upgrade across docker images daily before business start. It mostly worked really well, except those few times were a Docker upgrade had to be rolled back, or that one time the bundled pg_shared_buffers was set at 1MB by default, making schema upgrades impossible for bigger instances, or a version major would break pipeline expectations forcing to upgrade 200+ repos at a time (we pinned to major afterwards). Lately I was also receiving an almost weekly "critical patch" newsletter due to critical/high vulnerabilities, which I can only imagine are due to LLM running over the code and identifying bugs.
That said, I wish we hadn't migrated to GH, our self-hosted instance had WAY less downtime despite being perhaps a bit slower (mgmt saving money) and required a bit more toil: GH is nowhere near Enterprise-ready and it feels a downgrade across the board. GL has better access granularity, better docs, better integrations, and you can clearly see the UI received a lot of attention (although it does take 10m with a new account to pin the proper items in the maze of sub-menus that is the sidebar). You can also look at the code and help out if needed, and/or simply provide a patched version to your image via a docker mount.
If you're really looking at self-hosting GitLab for a smallish team (up to 50-100 ppl), prepare at the very least a 16GB machine (best 32GB) with 4 cores and a decent SSD, and at least a small team (1-3 people) that can maintain it properly or jump at it at any moment. For runners, a small k3s cluster is ideal to make use of all the resources you can throw at it without worrying about managing the runner state/configuration.
Replies
Never forget the sudden GitLab price-hike and flavor feature changes just a few years ago. I was literally about to go from free to paid, when the pricing doubled nearly overnight. I left for Gitea.
Setting up custom GitLab runners can be cumbersome in the beginning! We faced that multiple times with various customer projects for which we were using GitLab.com managed repos. That's why my colleague and I recently built a "GitLab Runners as a Service" [0] -- simply use your self-managed GitLab or GitLab.com account to login, adding pipeline runners is a 1-click operation! Under the hood we provision a Hetzner machine for you runners and automatically connect your GitLab group or project to it. Happy to hear your feedback!
ex-GitLabber here, and yes this is a pretty common scenario. GitLab as a product is pretty good, however GitLab Inc, is not great at supporting the broader community especially the SMB-Mid tier self-hosted users. (If you're big enterprise you'll get white glove support)
It's a bummer because they had so much potential to dethrone GitHub a few years ago but really missed the opportunity to position themselves as a viable alternative. That said I still use gitlab.com for my personal projects over anything owned by Microsoft.
I also self-hosted GitLab for some years, eventually ended up moving over to Gitea + WoodpeckerCI + Nexus (with Nexus for a while). Well there was DroneCI in the middle for a bit there as well, but Woodpecker is perfectly okay and more free in regards to what you can do. Only thing is that not that much other software out there supports Gitea, for example Kepler only knows about GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Trello and Linear.
Not bad resource wise at all for something serving 50 to 100 people. Don't forget a second machine for HA or at minimum DR !
Yeah, it's mind blowing to me that GH still doesn't have a branch viewer in each repo.
I'd also say that gitlab runners are the biggest failure point in gitlab and take some work to micro-manage. If I was setting up from scratch I would consider gitlab for source control, but some hosted service for CI
We did tun our own installation at work, supporting ~120 developers.
A single vm, 8 cpu cores and 64gb memory, using ssd disks on a local vmware cluster.
It worked okay but:
1. Was only exposed to the corporate network and some vpn connections
2. We did the upgrades late at night once every like six months, taking a snapshot of the whole thing from vmware side before touching anything
It worked pretty well and was relatively low maintenance. Frankly a very pleasant experience.
I’m using github and bitbucket at work nowadays and frankly i miss that experience, both as an user and as an administrator.
Edit: btw i left that job and that gitlab installation in 2022, no idea how things changed in the meantime.
> To all of those proposing self-hosted GitLab: ... it's not always a smooth sailing.
> (we pinned to major afterwards)
I mean OK. But also, if I want a reliable service in my business, I wouldn't typically auto-upgrade docker images nightly to "*".
gitlab.com and selfhosted gitlab in various companies in the last few years
Ok, with DSCI as monolith application where git and CI are the same server, 32GB RAM VM is more then enough , no need to host runners, no need in k8s cluster, no need in dedicated maintain team, so no extra costs on devops tasks ... Also with general programming languages for CI pipeline you are in full control and simplicity ...
> That said, I wish we hadn't migrated to GH, our self-hosted instance had WAY less downtime despite being perhaps a bit slower (mgmt saving money) and required a bit more toil
The key thing that drove our decision to self host gitlab was that WE were the ones in control of when things happened. We didn't do upgrades during times where we really needed our git infra up, and we were in control of our response time to incidents. We were not at the mercy of some other company's upgrade schedule and incident resolution process.
Of course, it comes with added workload and responsibility, but as the above comment says, it was not that onerous. While we paid for Gitlab Enterprise for a long time, we eventually switched to the free tier as that company was winding down (for reasons unrelated to our choice of git hosting), and the free tier actually has pretty much everything we needed.