Chapter 1, Introducing the GitLab Architecture, provides a short introduction to the company and the people that created the product, along with a high-level overview of GitLab and its components.
Chapter 2, Installing GitLab, shows you how to install and configure GitLab via several different methods. This can be done from scratch, or via the Omnibus installer. Special attention is given to Docker and Kubernetes when outlining containerized solutions. Finally, a cloud installation via the DigitalOcean infrastructure is taken as an example.
Chapter 3, Configuring GitLab Using the UI, explains the options in the GitLab web UI that can be configured after installation. This chapter also covers the administration pages where these instance-level options are situated.
Chapter 4, Configuring GitLab from the Terminal, looks at the different ways of configuring GitLab. The first approach is by using the Omnibus package installer provided by GitLab, which automates most of the installation. The chapter continues with configuring a source installation. Configuring Docker containers and managing a Kubernetes installation are also covered.
Chapter 5, Importing Your Project from GitHub to GitLab, outlines the process of migration from GitHub via a hands-on lab. It starts by exploring settings that should be altered in your GitHub project. After this, the settings necessary in GitLab to prepare an import are shown, and finally, the procedure for running the import is addressed.
Chapter 6, Migrating from CVS, begins with a comparison of the fundamentally different systems of CVS and Git. It then provides directions on preparing for migration. Actual conversion is addressed, as is the cleaning up of artifacts not needed anymore.
Chapter 7, Switching from SVN, begins by explaining the subtle and not-so-subtle differences between SVN and Git. The reader is shown how to migrate using two different methods: mirroring with SubGit and using the svn2git tool.
Chapter 8, Moving Repositories from TFS, first deals with the differences between TFS and Git. Subsequently, the act of migrating information from a TFS project to Git is shown via the use of the git-tfs tool.
Chapter 9, GitLab Vision - the Whole Toolchain in One Application, explains GitLab's vision of providing the whole DevOps toolchain to the developer, looking at the origins of XP and the Agile manifesto. The emergence of the DevOps paradigm is also explored, and the toolchain that GitLab provides is summarized.
Chapter 10, Create Your Product, Verify It, and Package It, shows how the product vision for GitLab and its workflow is centered around the idea of providing a complete toolchain to create a product. This chapter focuses on the different phases and explains the relevant concepts with examples.
Chapter 11, The Release and Configure Phase, discusses one of the big features of GitLab: the ability to offer the complete journey to production with different, easy-to-design stages. This way, you can create different environments and, ultimately, automate the whole pipeline for a product.
Chapter 12, Monitoring with Prometheus, handles ways of monitoring your GitLab environment by using the built-in Prometheus feature and default scripting languages. The second part of this chapter explains the different security tests that are available.
Chapter 13, Integrating GitLab with CI/CD Tools, explains how, although GitLab aims to provide a complete toolchain in the real world, there will always be a need for integration. This chapter explains some of the bigger possible integrations that are configurable out of the box. It closes with a section on how webhooks provide a general way to consume information from GitLab.
Chapter 14, Setting Up Your Project for GitLab Continuous Integration, describes GitLab CI concepts that are present on the application server and can be fine-tuned and customized per project. The second part of the chapter mainly focuses on how to get your project ready to use these CI concepts and set up a runner for it to use.
Chapter 15, Installing and Configuring GitLab Runners, explains the way GitLab runners work, by installing them. The next step is creating an example project and building it with a shell executor.
Chapter 16, Using GitLab Runners with Docker or Kubernetes, examines the architecture of Docker-based runners and runners using the Kubernetes API, using the same examples as in earlier chapters.
Chapter 17, Autoscaling GitLab CI Runners, demonstrates the architecture of runners using autoscaling. The number of runners required will decrease and increase based on demand. The example shown uses VirtualBox and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deploy instances.
Chapter 18, Monitoring CI Metrics, deals with monitoring specific GitLab runners. Using a lab, we demonstrate how to enable monitoring inside the runner. After this introduction, the specific functional and system metrics are explained.
Chapter 19, Creating a Basic HA Architecture by Using Horizontal Scaling, visualizes the way in which different components interact. Secondly, the preparation of databases is shown, as well as several all-in-one application servers. Finally, the shared filesystem for repositories and Redis caching in this high availability (HA) setup is explained. We will use Terraform and Ansible to create the demonstration environment.
Chapter 20, Managing a Hybrid HA Environment, builds on the earlier architecture of horizontal HA, but continues to grow in complexity. The main difference is that the application servers combined several components that are now split into new tiers.
Chapter 21, Making Your Environment Fully Distributed, builds on earlier chapters. A fully distributed architecture aims to create more fault tolerance by again splitting components into new tiers. There is now an SSH node and several sidekiq tiers.
Chapter 22, Using Geo to Create Distributed Read-Only Copies of GitLab, starts with an explanation of the GEO product, which is part of the Enterprise Edition license. Using the same tools as in earlier chapters from Section 5 of this book 'Scale the Server Infrastructure (High Availability Setup)', we will explain how to set up GEO to create replication between two different geographical locations.
