Deploy GitLab Community Edition on Northflank

GitLab is a DevSecOps platform for hosting Git repositories, managing projects, running CI/CD pipelines, and collaborating on software development. Self-hosting GitLab gives you control over where your source code and development data are stored and how your GitLab environment is configured.

With Northflank, you can deploy GitLab Community Edition in minutes using the GitLab Community Edition stack template. This prebuilt setup handles the GitLab container, persistent storage, networking, health checks, and required configuration automatically, so you can focus on using GitLab instead of configuring the underlying infrastructure.

GitLab Community Edition is the self-hosted edition of GitLab that provides the core features needed to manage software development projects. You can use it to host Git repositories, manage issues and merge requests, run CI/CD pipelines, and collaborate with your team.

Because you run GitLab yourself, you retain control over the environment where your repositories and development data are stored. You can deploy it on Northflank Cloud or use Northflank BYOC to run it in your own cloud environment.

The GitLab Community Edition stack template provisions everything needed to run a self-hosted GitLab instance.

It includes:

• GitLab Community Edition running from the official gitlab/gitlab-ce Docker image
• Persistent Northflank volume for GitLab configuration, logs, and application data
• Public HTTP endpoint for accessing the GitLab web interface
• Preconfigured GitLab environment settings and secret keys
• Readiness health check to verify that GitLab is ready to receive traffic
• Dedicated compute resources for running the GitLab service

The template mounts persistent storage to GitLab's /etc/gitlab, /var/log/gitlab, and /var/opt/gitlab directories so configuration, logs, and application data persist across service restarts and redeployments.

1. Create an account on Northflank.
2. Click Deploy GitLab Community Edition now.
3. Select the GitLab version you want to deploy.
4. Review the stack configuration.
5. Click Deploy stack to provision the GitLab environment.
6. Wait for the deployment to complete and click View resources.
7. Open the GitLab Service.
8. Open the generated public URL to access your GitLab instance.

GitLab can take several minutes to initialize during the first deployment. Wait for the service to pass its readiness check before accessing the GitLab UI.

This stack template gives you a complete self-hosted GitLab Community Edition setup:

• Host Git repositories and manage software projects
• Run CI/CD pipelines with your own GitLab instance
• Store GitLab configuration, logs, and application data on persistent storage
• Access your GitLab instance through a generated public domain
• Manage compute and storage resources from the Northflank dashboard
• Deploy GitLab on Northflank Cloud or your own cloud with BYOC

It is suitable for teams that want to self-host GitLab while avoiding the complexity of manually configuring the underlying container infrastructure.

• The GitLab service runs the official GitLab Community Edition container.
• The persistent volume stores GitLab configuration, logs, and application data.
• The secret group provides GitLab's configuration and automatically generated secret keys.
• The public HTTP endpoint routes traffic to the GitLab service.
• The readiness check monitors /-/readiness to determine when GitLab is ready.
• Northflank handles the underlying container orchestration and networking required to run the service.

The GitLab service uses persistent storage for its core data, allowing the environment to retain its state when the service is restarted or redeployed.

Deploying GitLab Community Edition on Northflank gives you a straightforward way to run a self-hosted GitLab instance without manually configuring the underlying infrastructure.

With this stack template, you get GitLab Community Edition with persistent storage, networking, health checks, and preconfigured settings. You can deploy it on Northflank Cloud or in your own cloud through BYOC, then manage the GitLab service and its resources directly from the Northflank dashboard.