[Touche]

2 biggest downsides to GitLab:

1) It's a resource hog. Big time.

2) It's incredibly hard to set up. The installation instructions and the development instructions are essentially the same. Key point, an end user should never have to `bundle install`, ever.

[neumann]

Agreed on both counts - I blame Ruby.

We enjoy using it, but to new users I would recommend looking into gitbucket

https://github.com/takezoe/gitbucket

written in scala and no install necessary!

[js4all]

I didn't know about gitbucket and just tried it. It is a war file that brings everything. It is easy to setup and can run standalone for tests: java -jar gitbucket.war. The UI is mostly github. First impression is really good.

[Touche]

Installed it and am impressed as well. Wonder how this has stayed underneath the radar. Can turn off that bulky GitLab droplet now.

[GhotiFish]

Thanks for letting me know about this little jem. That was an extreme contrast in deployment. I feel like throwing out bitbucket and setting this up on one of our virtual machines. This looks perfect!

[girvo]

Oh wow. I've been using GitLab since 4.0, but I've not got it completely updated because it's such a pain in the ass. This looks awesome (and gives me a Scala project to hack on!)

[GhotiFish]

it is?

Oh... it's made in ruby.

https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/tree/master/app/control...

self comment: this post isn't gonna end well :P

[eurg]

@2) Maybe in an older version, but not anymore. The installation is not as nice as in a single apt-get call, but the install documentation makes a setup a matter of copy'n'paste.

[Touche]

Copying and pasting a few dozen commands and one of them is very likely to fail. I've installed GitLab 3 times and something has failed all 3 times. There's no excuse not to provide a tarball that includes (1) both gitlabhq and gitlab-shell (2) all gems needed. Everything else can be apt-get installed, which is fine. But at least provide a tarball of your application's code.

[actionscripted]

Been using GitLab since (I think) 4.0 and have yet to experience any problems upgrading on a fairly standard LAMP-like web server setup on a VPS. To anyone having troubles, what exactly are the errors/problems?

(Late) Edit: any problems I've ever had with upgrades have been related to not properly adjusting settings when moving new config files around. For example, in upgrading to 6.3 I failed to copy over my custom listen lines in unicorn for a non-standard port.

[girvo]

I love GitLab, and yeah the install isn't hard. But have you ever tried updating it? Impossible as far as I've tried. Breaks stuff every time :(

[eurg]

I upgrade regularly, typically two weeks after release of a new version (except when there are security fixes, like recently).

It could (and should) be more streamlined, I admit, but using diff et al. on the two affected configuration files makes the process fast. One could do it by hand w/o issues, but I wouldn't like it.

[phunehehe0]

I maintain a set of Chef cookbooks (more Ruby, I'm afraid ;)) that includes a cookbook for GitLab[1]. The cookbook may not be the best, but it has been serving us well. There are numerous other Chef cookbooks for GitLab.

IMHO GitLab is easy to set up compared to something like Postfix. Making a GitLab server do what it's supposed to do is straightforward. You just follow all the steps. Making Postfix work as a proper mail server is kinda a mess.

[1]: https://github.com/phunehehe/chef-cookbooks/tree/master/gitl...

[jlgaddis]

> IMHO GitLab is easy to set up compared to something like Postfix. Making a GitLab server do what it's supposed to do is straightforward. You just follow all the steps. Making Postfix work as a proper mail server is kinda a mess.

Heh, I feel exactly the opposite.

[braco_alva]

I don't know about the resources part, but the installation should be easy using Bitnami

http://bitnami.com/stack/gitlab

[joelhaasnoot]

Tried installing it locally on my RaspberryPi - while the latter is already hard, this ended up being impossible. I stuck with gitolite which is the easiest ever. Even the configuration is a git repo.

[marcinkuzminski]

You might try RhodeCode, we spend a lot of resources recently into an Installer for it that makes a few clicks installation, even for windows.

[sebastiank123]

Yes, the installation of RhodeCode is really a no-brainer now.