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gitlab-org--gitlab-foss/doc/install/requirements.md
Cody West 615a944353 Update requirements wording 
I'm adding some wording to our hardware requirements to explain that needs vary
by workload. I also included some examples of factors that may influence the
workload.
2019-08-02 12:42:47 -05:00

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Requirements

This page includes useful information on the supported Operating Systems as well as the hardware requirements that are needed to install and use GitLab.

Operating Systems

Supported Linux distributions

  • Ubuntu
  • Debian
  • CentOS
  • openSUSE
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (please use the CentOS packages and instructions)
  • Scientific Linux (please use the CentOS packages and instructions)
  • Oracle Linux (please use the CentOS packages and instructions)

For the installations options, see the main installation page.

Unsupported Linux distributions and Unix-like operating systems

  • Arch Linux
  • Fedora
  • FreeBSD
  • Gentoo
  • macOS

Installation of GitLab on these operating systems is possible, but not supported. Please see the installation from source guide and the installation guides for more information.

Microsoft Windows

GitLab is developed for Linux-based operating systems. It does not run on Microsoft Windows, and we have no plans to support it in the near future. For the latest development status view this issue. Please consider using a virtual machine to run GitLab.

Ruby versions

GitLab requires Ruby (MRI) 2.5. Support for Ruby versions below 2.5 (2.3, 2.4) will stop with GitLab 11.6.

You will have to use the standard MRI implementation of Ruby. We love JRuby and Rubinius but GitLab needs several Gems that have native extensions.

Hardware requirements

Storage

The necessary hard drive space largely depends on the size of the repos you want to store in GitLab but as a rule of thumb you should have at least as much free space as all your repos combined take up.

If you want to be flexible about growing your hard drive space in the future consider mounting it using LVM so you can add more hard drives when you need them.

Apart from a local hard drive you can also mount a volume that supports the network file system (NFS) protocol. This volume might be located on a file server, a network attached storage (NAS) device, a storage area network (SAN) or on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume.

If you have enough RAM memory and a recent CPU the speed of GitLab is mainly limited by hard drive seek times. Having a fast drive (7200 RPM and up) or a solid state drive (SSD) will improve the responsiveness of GitLab.

NOTE: Note: Since file system performance may affect GitLab's overall performance, we do not recommend using EFS for storage. See the relevant documentation for more details.

CPU

This is the recommended minimum hardware for a handful of example GitLab user base sizes. Your exact needs may be more, depending on your workload. Your workload is influenced by factors such as - but not limited to - how active your users are, how much automation you use, mirroring, and repo/change size.

  • 1 core supports up to 100 users but the application can be a bit slower due to having all workers and background jobs running on the same core
  • 2 cores is the recommended minimum number of cores and supports up to 100 users
  • 4 cores supports up to 500 users
  • 8 cores supports up to 1,000 users
  • 32 cores supports up to 5,000 users
  • More users? Run it high-availability on multiple application servers

Memory

This is the recommended minimum hardware for a handful of example GitLab user base sizes. Your exact needs may be more, depending on your workload. Your workload is influenced by factors such as - but not limited to - how active your users are, how much automation you use, mirroring, and repo/change size.

You need at least 8GB of addressable memory (RAM + swap) to install and use GitLab! The operating system and any other running applications will also be using memory so keep in mind that you need at least 4GB available before running GitLab. With less memory GitLab will give strange errors during the reconfigure run and 500 errors during usage.

  • 4GB RAM + 4GB swap supports up to 100 users but it will be very slow
  • 8GB RAM is the recommended minimum memory size for all installations and supports up to 100 users
  • 16GB RAM supports up to 500 users
  • 32GB RAM supports up to 1,000 users
  • 128GB RAM supports up to 5,000 users
  • More users? Run it high-availability on multiple application servers

We recommend having at least 2GB of swap on your server, even if you currently have enough available RAM. Having swap will help reduce the chance of errors occurring if your available memory changes. We also recommend configuring the kernel's swappiness setting to a low value like 10 to make the most of your RAM while still having the swap available when needed.

NOTE: Note: The 25 workers of Sidekiq will show up as separate processes in your process overview (such as top or htop) but they share the same RAM allocation since Sidekiq is a multithreaded application. Please see the section below about Unicorn workers for information about how many you need of those.

Database

The server running the database should have at least 5-10 GB of storage available, though the exact requirements depend on the size of the GitLab installation (e.g. the number of users, projects, etc).

We currently support the following databases:

  • PostgreSQL

Support for MySQL was removed in GitLab 12.1. Existing users using GitLab with MySQL/MariaDB are advised to migrate to PostgreSQL before upgrading.

PostgreSQL Requirements

As of GitLab 10.0, PostgreSQL 9.6 or newer is required, and earlier versions are not supported. We highly recommend users to use PostgreSQL 9.6 as this is the PostgreSQL version used for development and testing.

Users using PostgreSQL must ensure the pg_trgm extension is loaded into every GitLab database. This extension can be enabled (using a PostgreSQL super user) by running the following query for every database:

CREATE EXTENSION pg_trgm;

On some systems you may need to install an additional package (e.g. postgresql-contrib) for this extension to become available.

Additional requirements for GitLab Geo

If you are using GitLab Geo:

  • We strongly recommend running Omnibus-managed instances as they are actively developed and tested. We aim to be compatible with most external (not managed by Omnibus) databases (for example, AWS RDS) but we do not guarantee compatibility.
  • The tracking database requires the postgres_fdw extension.
CREATE EXTENSION postgres_fdw;

Unicorn Workers

For most instances we recommend using: CPU cores + 1 = unicorn workers. So for a machine with 2 cores, 3 unicorn workers is ideal.

For all machines that have 2GB and up we recommend a minimum of three unicorn workers. If you have a 1GB machine we recommend to configure only two Unicorn workers to prevent excessive swapping.

As long as you have enough available CPU and memory capacity, it's okay to increase the number of unicorn workers and this will usually help to reduce the response time of the applications and increase the ability to handle parallel requests.

To change the Unicorn workers when you have the Omnibus package (which defaults to the recommendation above) please see the Unicorn settings in the Omnibus GitLab documentation.

Redis and Sidekiq

Redis stores all user sessions and the background task queue. The storage requirements for Redis are minimal, about 25kB per user. Sidekiq processes the background jobs with a multithreaded process. This process starts with the entire Rails stack (200MB+) but it can grow over time due to memory leaks. On a very active server (10,000 active users) the Sidekiq process can use 1GB+ of memory.

Prometheus and its exporters

As of Omnibus GitLab 9.0, Prometheus and its related exporters are enabled by default, to enable easy and in depth monitoring of GitLab. Approximately 200MB of memory will be consumed by these processes, with default settings.

If you would like to disable Prometheus and it's exporters or read more information about it, check the Prometheus documentation.

GitLab Runner

We strongly advise against installing GitLab Runner on the same machine you plan to install GitLab on. Depending on how you decide to configure GitLab Runner and what tools you use to exercise your application in the CI environment, GitLab Runner can consume significant amount of available memory.

Memory consumption calculations, that are available above, will not be valid if you decide to run GitLab Runner and the GitLab Rails application on the same machine.

It is also not safe to install everything on a single machine, because of the security reasons, especially when you plan to use shell executor with GitLab Runner.

We recommend using a separate machine for each GitLab Runner, if you plan to use the CI features. The GitLab Runner server requirements depend on:

  • The type of executor you configured on GitLab Runner.
  • Resources required to run build jobs.
  • Job concurrency settings.

Since the nature of the jobs varies for each use case, you will need to experiment by adjusting the job concurrency to get the optimum setting.

For reference, GitLab.com's auto-scaling shared runner is configured so that a single job will run in a single instance with:

  • 1vCPU.
  • 3.75GB of RAM.

Supported web browsers

We support the current and the previous major release of:

  • Firefox
  • Chrome/Chromium
  • Safari
  • Microsoft Edge
  • Internet Explorer 11

The browser vendors release regular minor version updates with important bug fixes and security updates. Support is only provided for the current minor version of the major version you are running.

Each time a new browser version is released, we begin supporting that version and stop supporting the third most recent version.

NOTE: Note: We do not support running GitLab with JavaScript disabled in the browser and have no plans of supporting that in the future because we have features such as Issue Boards which require JavaScript extensively.