Setup GitLab Sever Locally

Here’s the guide about how to setup a GitLab server locally using Docker under mac OS through the following steps:

Create folder in file system to store GitLab data.
Create GitLab container.
Setup GitLab container.
Setup a new user.

Before continuing, please ensure Docker is installed in your machine.

Create a GitLab Folder

Create a folder .gitlab and 3 sub-folders to store different data in GitLab. You can see the table below to see their usage.

$ mkdir -p ~/.gitlab/data ~/.gitlab/logs ~/.gitlab/config

Local Location	Container Location	Usage
`~/.gitlab/data`	`/var/opt/gitlab`	For storing application data
`~/.gitlab/logs`	`/var/log/gitlab`	For storing logs
`~/.gitlab/config`	`/etc/gitlab`	For storing the GitLab configuration files

Create GitLab Container

Create a docker container using the following command. If the image gitlab/gitlab-ce does not exist locally, docker will pull it automatically from the Docker Hub.

$ docker run \
    --detach \
    --publish 443:443 --publish 80:80 --publish 22:22 \
    --name gitlab \
    --restart always \
    --volume ~/.gitlab/config:/etc/gitlab \
    --volume ~/.gitlab/logs:/var/log/gitlab \
    --volume ~/.gitlab/data:/var/opt/gitlab \
    gitlab/gitlab-ce:latest

Now, the GitLab container gitlab is created and running. Go to http://localhost and reset administrator’s password.

Setup GitLab Container

In this step, we’ll see how to configure GitLab properly, including SSH mapping, and docker container external URL.

Create a SSH key passphrase for SSH connection with GitLab. Name it as gitlab_rsa.
```
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "your_email@example.com"
```

Add SSH port mapping to localhost in ~/.ssh/config

Host localhost
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/gitlab_rsa

Setup New User

Create a new user in GitLab
Add SSH key (public key) into this new user’s GitLab account
Create a private project
Clone the project via SSH protocol

Create a GitLab Folder

Create GitLab Container

Setup GitLab Container

Setup New User

See Also