Note: GitSwarm EE is only available for 64-bit systems.
See the installation instructions.
GitSwarm EE is developed for Unix operating systems. GitSwarm EE does not run on Windows and we have no plans of supporting it in the near future. Please consider using a virtual machine to run GitSwarm EE.
GitSwarm EE requires several user accounts.
GitSwarm EE requires Ruby (MRI) 2.3. Support for Ruby versions below 2.3 (2.1, 2.2) will stop with GitSwarm EE 2017.1.
You will have to use the standard MRI implementation of Ruby. We love JRuby and Rubinius but GitLab needs several Gems that have native extensions.
The necessary hard drive space largely depends on the size of the repos you want to store in GitSwarm EE but as a rule of thumb you should have at least twice as much free space as all your repos combined take up.
Note that if you are mirroring projects to Helix Server using the locally provisioned Helix Git Fusion Server, you will want at least four times as much free space as all your repos combined.
If you want to be flexible about growing your hard drive space in the future consider mounting it using LVM so you can add more hard drives when you need them.
Apart from a local hard drive you can also mount a volume that supports the network file system (NFS) protocol. This volume might be located on a file server, a network attached storage (NAS) device, a storage area network (SAN) or on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume.
If you have enough RAM memory and a recent CPU the speed of GitSwarm EE is mainly limited by hard drive seek times. Having a fast drive (7200 RPM and up) or a solid state drive (SSD) will improve the responsiveness of GitSwarm EE.
For production use, it is recommended GitSwarm EE be run on a dedicated server. The Helix Server and Helix Git Fusion products should ideally be installed on their own independent machines. In that configuration:
By default, GitSwarm EE will attempt to automatically provision an instance of Helix Server and Helix Git Fusion all on the local system. When running all components on the same machine, we suggest a minimum of 4 cores.
You need at least 4GB of addressable memory (RAM + swap) to install and use GitSwarm EE! With less memory, GitSwarm EE will give strange errors during the reconfigure run and 500 errors during usage.
For production use, it is recommended GitSwarm EE be run on a dedicated server. The Helix Server and Helix Git Fusion products should ideally be installed on their own independent machines. In that configuration:
We recommend having at least 2GB of swap on your server, even if you currently have enough available RAM. Having swap will help reduce the chance of errors occurring if your available memory changes.
Notice: The 25 workers of Sidekiq will show up as separate processes in your process overview (such as top or htop) but they share the same RAM allocation since Sidekiq is a multithreaded application. See the section below about Unicorn workers.
It's possible to increase the amount of unicorn workers and this will usually help to reduce the response time of the applications and increase the ability to handle parallel requests.
For most instances we recommend using: CPU cores + 1 = unicorn workers. So for a machine with 2 cores, 3 unicorn workers is ideal.
A minimum of 3 unicorn workers is required for concurrent use of the system.
For all machines that have 2GB and up we recommend a minimum of three unicorn workers. If you have a 1GB machine we recommend to configure only two Unicorn worker to prevent excessive swapping.
If you need to adjust the Unicorn timeout or the number of workers you can use the following settings in /etc/gitswarm/gitswarm.rb:
unicorn['worker_processes'] = 3
unicorn['worker_timeout'] = 60Run sudo gitswarm-ctl reconfigure for the change to take effect.
If you want to run the database separately, the recommended database size is 1 MB per user.
Users using PostgreSQL must ensure the pg_trgm extension is loaded into every GitLab database. This extension can be enabled (using a PostgreSQL super user) by running the following query for every database:
CREATE EXTENSION pg_trgm;On some systems you may need to install an additional package (e.g. postgresql-contrib) for this extension to become available.
Redis stores all user sessions and the background task queue. The storage requirements for Redis are minimal, about 25kB per user. Sidekiq processes the background jobs with a multithreaded process. This process starts with the entire Rails stack (200MB+) but it can grow over time due to memory leaks. On a very active server (10,000 active users) the Sidekiq process can use 1GB+ of memory.
We support the current and the previous major release of Firefox, Safari and Microsoft browsers (Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11).
Each time a new browser version is released, we begin supporting that version and stop supporting the third most recent version.