/AWS-EC2-Gitlab-Instance

A Self hosted Gitlab application hosted on an EC2 instance in front of an ALB. Includes support for domain configuration with Route53 & regular backups into an S3 bucket

EC2-Gitlab-Instance

Instance:

  • ImageId: ami-084e8c05825742534 (eu-west-2)
  • InstanceType: t2.medium

Setup:

  1. deploy the template to cloudformation
  2. enter the parameters
  3. configuration with a domain:
    1. including the hostedZoneId, domainName, subDomainName & domainCertArn parameters will:
      1. Create a HTTPS loadbalancer targetGroup & listener with the domainCertArn on port 443
      2. Create a dns record in the hostedZoneId for subDomainName.domainName e.g. gitlab.example.co.uk
      3. Configure the gitlab instance for the domain subDomainName.domainName
    2. not including the hostedZoneId, domainName, subDomainName & domainCertArn parameters will:
      1. Omit the HTTPS loadbalancer targetGroup & listener
      2. Not create any dns records
      3. Configure the gitlab instance to be accessible from the loadbalancer e.g. {loadBalancerName}-1234567890.AWS::Region.elb.amazonaws.com
  4. Give time for the instance to create, it will be accessible from the dns record or the public ELB domain

Notes

Q: Why is a load balancer needed? A: The Gitlab CE installation creates & signs its own HTTPS certificate which some browsers warn about when trying to access the site. The load balancer allows port 443 to be listened on & inject your domain certificate when using HTTPS to resolve this issue.

Q: How do backups work? A: The gitlab.rb file is configured to send the Gitlab backup, the gitlab.rb file & gitlab-secrets.json. A backup will occur everyday at 00:00. A backup can also be preform by running the preform-backup SSM document.

The default username is root & the userData script sets the password to gitlabRootPassword stack parameter, The default being Password123!

Self-Managed Gitlab CE

Once you finish setting up Gitlab CE you can login, create groups & repos without issue. You can even clone them locally (setup ssh), add files then push them back to your Gitlab. Additionally, You can also register your own runners on a global or group level check this out. These runners can then create resources in aws using a template.yaml & gitlab-ci.yaml.