The future is in containers. It has been said for years, and now it is almost fact. Running applications in containers provides many advantages. It requires much less operating system overhead because containers share the capacity of the underlying operating system. GitLab provides GitLab Docker images via Docker Hub, the central registry on the internet for official Docker images.
Both GitLab CE and EE are available and are called gitlab/gitlab-ce and gitlab/gitlab-ee. GitLab Docker images are feature complete images of GitLab and they run all the services in a single container.
Containers can run in different environments, but let's start with the following:
- Run the image in Docker Engine directly.
- Run GitLab using docker-compose.
Currently containers can be run on Linux, macOS and Windows (your mileage will vary).
In the following examples we will...