gitlab-org--gitlab-foss/doc/development/db_dump.md

Importing a database dump into a staging enviroment

Sometimes it is useful to import the database from a production environment into a staging environment for testing. The procedure below assumes you have SSH+sudo access to both the production environment and the staging VM.

On the staging VM, add the following line to /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb to speed up large database imports.

# On STAGING
echo "postgresql['checkpoint_segments'] = 64" | sudo tee -a /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb
sudo touch /etc/gitlab/skip-auto-migrations
sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure

Next, we let the production environment stream a compressed SQL dump to our local machine via SSH, and redirect this stream to a psql client on the staging VM.

# On LOCAL MACHINE
ssh -C gitlab.example.com sudo -u gitlab-psql /opt/gitlab/embedded/bin/pg_dump -Cc gitlabhq_production |\
  ssh -C staging-vm sudo -u gitlab-psql /opt/gitlab/embedded/bin/psql -d template1

Recreating directory structure

If you need to re-create some directory structure on the staging server you can use this procedure.

First, on the production server, create a list of directories you want to re-create.

# On PRODUCTION
(umask 077; sudo find /var/opt/gitlab/git-data/repositories -maxdepth 1 -type d -print0 > directories.txt)

Copy directories.txt to the staging server and create the directories there.

# On STAGING
sudo -u git xargs -0 mkdir -p < directories.txt