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Installation and Setup

This assumes you have already satisfied all prerequisites. You can manage gitlab-mirrors in one of two ways. You can use your own user using your own GitLab private token. Or you can use a dedicated system user and gitmirror user whose only purpose is to mirror repositories. The former can be done by any user where the latter requires administrator privileges in GitLab.

Things to note before beginning:

  • GitLab will not allow users (even admins) to add a project to a group unless that user is designated an owner of the group. This is by design in GitLab.
  • gitlab-mirrors will not auto-create a group (though it will auto-create projects within a group). This is by design in gitlab-mirrors. One should create the group manually and assign the gitmirror user as an owner of the group. This is to ensure mirroring a repository for a particular group is a purposeful action.
  • gitlab-mirrors must not be shared by the same user as GitLab which is typically the git user. It will not work and you'll run into a lot of configuration trouble.

Using a dedicated GitLab user

Overview

  • Create gitmirror system user.
  • Create gitmirror GitLab Administrator user.
  • Create a Mirrors group in GitLab owned by gitmirror (or name it whatever you want).
  • Clone gitlab-mirrors repository in gitmirror system user.
  • Modify config.sh using the user token from gitmirror GitLab user.
  • Create a cron job to update mirrors regularly.

Create gitmirror system user

Create a system user called gitmirror and generate SSH keys.

adduser gitmirror
su - gitmirror
ssh-keygen

Create ~/.ssh/config for the gitmirror user. Add your GitLab server host and the user used to talk to GitLab.

Host gitlab.example.com
    User git

Create gitmirror GitLab user

Create a gitmirror user in GitLab and set the user to be a GitLab administrator. Set up the SSH keys with the gitmirror user in GitLab. Obtain the Private token from the user.

Create Mirrors group in GitLab

Create "Mirrors" group in GitLab and designate gitmirror GitLab user as the Owner of the group. Realistically the group does not have to be called Mirrors. It could be anything and in fact multiple mirror groups can be mirrored within the same repository folder.

Clone the gitlab-mirrors repository and set values in config.sh.

su - gitmirrors
mkdir repositories
touch private_token
git clone https://github.com/samrocketman/gitlab-mirrors.git
cd gitlab-mirrors
chmod 755 *.sh
cp config.sh.SAMPLE config.sh

Modify config.sh

Modify the values in config.sh for your setup. Write the private token of the gitmirror GitLab user into ~/private_token of your gitmirror system user.

Schedule cron job

Once you have set up your config.sh let's add the git-mirrors.sh script to crontab. Just execute crontab -e and add the following value to it.

@hourly /home/gitmirror/gitlab-mirrors/git-mirrors.sh

Mirror to multiple GitLab groups

Here's an example of a file tree where I have multiple groups specified with a different gitlab-mirrors project governing each.

/home/gitmirror/
├── mirror-management
│   ├── Mirrors
│   │   ├── authors_files
│   │   └── gitlab-mirrors
│   └── Subscribers
│       └── gitlab-mirrors
└── repositories
    ├── Mirrors
    │   ├── git
    │   ├── gitlabhq
    │   ├── gitlab-shell
    │   ├── nsca-ng
    │   ├── python-gitlab
    │   ├── ruby
    │   └── systems-svn
    └── Subscribers
        └── GitLab Enterprise Edition

Where I have all of my gitlab-mirrors installation located in /home/gitmirror/mirror-management and the config.sh for each is similar except for the gitlab_namespace option for each config.sh.

Using your own user

Your steps will be similar to using a dedicated gitmirror user. Set up your SSH keys; copy config.sh and configure it; use your own system cron job to synchronize mirrors on a schedule. There are a few caveats to using your own user instead of a dedicated administrator.

  1. Currently there is a bug in GitLab 6.0 #5042 which prevents a non-Administrator GitLab user from moving a project to a group even if the group is owned by the user. This means that if you wish to mirror projects in namespaces other than your own username then you will have to first manually create the mirror in GitLab and then run the add_mirror.sh command (see Managing repositories).
  2. You user will include mirror pushes in your user statistics.

Next up is Managing mirrored repositories