Gitlab HA setup template on AWS

This template is a POC to setup a Gitlab system with High Availability on Amazon Web Service Cloud.

This template is heavily inspired by Gitlab university : HA on AWS.

The project tries to follow Immutable server pattern and Infrastructure-as-Code principles by using :

• Packer to create Amazon Virtual Machine Images (AMI)
• Ansible to install and configure packages on these Virtual Machine Images when running Packer
• Terraform to create and orchestrate the cloud infrastructure
• cloud-init and jinja2-cli to finalize setup automatically when launching AWS instances from AMI
• Docker to run Continuous Integration in containers with Gitlab-CI

Requirements

• a AWS account (Be careful this template implies creating billable resources on AWS cloud)

  You will need an AWS access key and enough admin permissions to create AWS ressources

• a AWS Route 53 DNS zone already created (the template will add new subdomain DNS A records)

• a SSH Key pair to connect to Gitlab and AWS instances (see Github help for examples)

• Packer >= 0.12

• Terraform >= 8.2

• GNU Make or some Unix equivalent Implementation

• (optional) Graphiz to generate Terraform config Graph Images

  # on ubuntu/debian
  sudo apt-get install graphviz
  

Usage

Download the terraform and packer templates

git clone --recursive https://github.com/csanquer/gitlab-setup.git

To create the Gitlab infrastructure

1. Copy and edit the configuration files :

• terraform : terraform/terraform.dist.tfvars to terraform/terraform.tfvars
• packer : packer/config.dist.json to packer/config.json

2. create Amazon Machine Images :

• Gitlab
• Gitlab-CI-multirunner

make ami

3. check Terraform plan

make plan

3. if terraform plan is correct, create AWS resources by applying the terraform plan

make apply

• you can check again the terraform exported variables output

  make output
  

• you can also get Graphviz graphs of all terraform config

  # in PNG image format
  make graphs
  # or in SVG
  make graphs format=svg
  

After creation, wait for a few minutes the autoscaled gitlab instances finish self initialization.

if variables are set in terraform/terraform.tvars like :

aws_dns_zone = "my-aws.net"
gitlab_dns_subdomain = "gitlab"

The Gitlab server should be available to http://gitlab.my-aws.net/

To destroy the Gitlab infrastructure

make destroy