Omnibus-gitlab release process

Our main goal is to make it clear which version of GitLab is in an omnibus package.

On your development machine

• Pick a tag of GitLab to package (e.g. v6.6.0).
• Create a release branch in omnibus-gitlab (e.g. 6-6-stable).
• If the release branch already exists, for instance because you are doing a patch release, make sure to pull the latest changes to your local machine.

git pull https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab.git 6-6-stable # existing release branch

• Change the gitlab-rails version in omnibus-gitlab. In our example that would be default_version '490f99d45e0f610e88505ff0fb2dc83a557e22c5' # 6.6.0.
• Change the gitlab-shell version if necessary, for example default_version 'c26647b9d919085c669f49c71d0646ac23b9c9d9' # 1.9.4.
• Change the source to the repo you want to build from (CE / EE)
• Commit the new version to the release branch

git commit -m 'Pin GitLab to v6.6.0' config/software/gitlab-rails.rb

• Create an annotated tag on omnibus-gitlab corresponding to the GitLab tag. GitLab tag v6.6.0 becomes omnibus-gitlab tag 6.6.0.omnibus.

git tag -a 6.6.0.omnibus -m 'Pin GitLab to v6.6.0'

• Push the branch and the tag to the main repository.

git push origin 6-6-stable 6.6.0.omnibus

On the build machines

One-time

• Install release dependencies

# Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install python-pip

# CentOS 6
sudo yum install python-pip

# Centos 7
sudo easy_install pip

# All
sudo pip install awscli

Make sure mail is installed

# Ubuntu / Debian
sudo apt-get install mailutils

# Centos 6
sudo yum install mail

# Centos 7
sudo yum install mailx

As omnibus-build user:

sudo su - omnibus-build

• Set up a deploy key to fetch the GitLab EE source code.
• Put your email address in ~omnibus-build/.forward.
• Test email delivery:

date | mail -s "testing from $(uname -n)" $(cat ~/.forward)

• Configure aws credentials

aws configure # enter AWS key and secret

• Set up the attach.sh script

# Install screen first
sudo apt-get install screen
cat > attach.sh <<EOF
#!/bin/sh
script -c 'screen -x || screen' /dev/null
EOF
chmod +x attach.sh

Each build

• Log in as the build user and start a screen session

sudo su - omnibus-build
./attach.sh

• Check out the release tag of omnibus-gitlab.

cd ~/omnibus-gitlab
git fetch --all
git checkout 6.6.0.my-tag

• Check the system time; the S3 upload will fail if it is off by too much

date

You can adjust the time with the date command if necessary.

• Start the release script

./release.sh

This will clean --purge the build environment, build a package and upload it to S3.

• Detach from screen: press Ctrl-a DD
• Check in on the build after 30 minutes.
• When the build is done, update the download page with the package URL's and MD5 hashes.

See a previous CE example and EE example.