Self host gitlab using caddy

Question

I'm trying to install and host gitlab, but it requires and pulls in Nginx. Which would be fine, except I use Caddy and Caddy doesn't play well with Nginx and has to be disabled for Nginx to even start.

I like Caddy a lot, especially the built in file server, so just switching completely to Nginx isn't an option. I also have no interest in trying to do firewall redirects to try to use Nginx on a nonstandard port.

Is there any way to use gitlab without nginx, eg Caddy? There's no official documentation and the last thing I tried from an online forum completely broke my gitlab install and only pertained to Apache which I'm not using

My system is a dedicated cloud server running Ubuntu 20.04.

Answer 1

The answer from unixandria is correct for when it's from. Things have changed a little since then.

There's now this official section on GitLab Docs.

Also, GitLab 13.5 changed the location of the unix socket, so the Caddyfile should have this now:

git.example.com { reverse_proxy unix//var/opt/gitlab/gitlab-workhorse/sockets/socket } 

Answer 2

I finally figured it out.

GitLab doesn't listen on a port but a Unix socket. Luckily we can configure Caddy to reverse proxy to the socket in the Caddyfile like so:

git.example.com { reverse_proxy * unix//var/opt/gitlab/gitlab-workhorse/socket } 

Make sure caddy user is in git and gitlab-www groups and vice versa.

In /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb make sure these are configured as such:

nginx['enable'] = false web_server['external_users'] = ['caddy'] web_server['username'] = 'gitlab-www' web_server['group'] = 'gitlab-www' web_server['uid'] = nil web_server['gid'] = nil web_server['shell'] = '/bin/false' web_server['home'] = '/var/opt/gitlab/nginx' 

Then do

sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure sudo systemctl restart caddy (or restart Caddy manually if you don't use systemd) 

I've only tested with the official caddy and GitLab-EE packages on Ubuntu 20.04, and don't configure Caddy via API, but this should work for standard installs of GitLab.