Portainer is a fantastic tool that includes a GUI in order to manage your container workloads easier than with command line. It is free to use with a community edition and the documentation describes the installation which will take one approximately 5 minutes to complete.
In this article I will show you how to use portainer and its GUI to deploy a gitlab container on your setup.
If you use the default setup instructions then your instance will be created on localhost under 9000 port.
docker run -d -p 8000:8000 -p 9000:9000 --name=portainer --restart=always -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v portainer_data:/data portainer/portainer-ce
You can access it on http://127.0.0.1:9000/ where you will be prompted to login with the credentials you specified during the initial setup.
Under volumes you should create a new persistent volume which will be consumed from gitlab for data saving operations.
You can either create a new container and specify the dockerHub location or pull the image first and then use it to deploy your instance. I preferred the second way so I pulled the image locally.
docker pull gitlab/gitlab-ce
When completed you should see the below message
From containers press +Add new container. Set up the requested name (gitlab) and specify the image.
According to the documentation three partitions are needed in order to store data for gitlab.
$GITLAB_HOME/data:/var/opt/gitlab
$GITLAB_HOME/logs:/var/log/gitlab
$GITLAB_HOME/config:/etc/gitlab
Under env variables add the needed value as described from Gitlab documentation. Personally I used /Users/username/Documents/Gitlab on my computer.
Press deploy container and the creation procedure should start.
When you first launch your container by checking the logs you will verify that the installation steps are running. This operation should take up to 5-10 minutes.
Then you will see your container running. Stop container and perform also the below configurations:
From restart policies, select always:
From ports configuration add the below bindings (80:80, 443:443)
By mapping ports 80 and 443 to your host you will be able to access gitlab from your browser using localhost:80.
Add also your hostname and domain from network tab.
When the deployment is finished, if you access the localhost address you will see the setup screen.
You can find instructions on how to install gitlab through cli or dockerfile from gitlab
The default username that should be used to login is root.
In order to verify that persistent storage is working as expected, create a new test project, commit a file, close container and then start it again.
Stop container
Login to Gitlab again, and your test-project should be there for you.
