Development setup

To avoid building the packages for every change you do during development, it is useful to setup a VM on which you can develop.

Once you get the VM running, download the package from https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/ and using the directions there finish the package installation.

Once the package is installed, navigate to /opt/gitlab/embedded/cookbooks and remove the gitlab directory which holds the internal omnibus-gitlab cookbook.

Clone the omnibus-gitlab repository from https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab.git to a known location, for example /home/.

Once the repository is cloned symlink the cookbook in the omnibus-gitlab repository, for example:

ln -s /home/omnibus-gitlab/files/gitlab-cookbooks/gitlab /opt/gitlab/embedded/cookbooks

Now you can do the changes in the omnibus-gitlab repository, try the changes right away and contribute back to omnibus-gitlab.