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Installing Gitorious on Ubuntu 11.04

 6 mins

This guide is based on the Ubuntu Installation Guide from the Gitorious Wiki, but it is a little outdated, so here’s my updated version.

Sudo make sandwich

Pretty much all of the following commands need to be executed as the superuser, so first of all we make ourselves root (alternatively you could prepend sudo to every command, but that is rather tiresome. I do not recommend to always work as root though, because that way you will incur the wrath of the invisible pink unicorn):

$ sudo su
[sudo] password for <username>:

Install packages

When installing all these packages, you will be asked for a MySQL root password, which you should remember, because you will need it later on.

$ aptitude install \
    build-essential zlib1g-dev tcl-dev libexpat-dev libxslt1-dev \
    libcurl4-openssl-dev postfix apache2 mysql-server mysql-client \
    apg geoip-bin libgeoip1 libgeoip-dev sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev \
    imagemagick libpcre3 libpcre3-dev zlib1g zlib1g-dev libyaml-dev \
    libmysqlclient15-dev apache2-dev libonig-dev ruby-dev rubygems \
    libopenssl-ruby libdbd-mysql-ruby libmysql-ruby \
    libmagick++-dev zip unzip memcached git-core git-svn git-doc \
    git-cvs irb

Install Ruby Gems

Apparently some of the gems required by Gitorious need at least RubyGems v1.4 to work, and Ubuntu 11.04 ships with v1.3.7, so you need to force-update RubyGems (“force” because usually you would update RubyGems through aptitude):

$ REALLY_GEM_UPDATE_SYSTEM=1 gem update --system

Now we can install all the necessary gems:

$ gem install --no-ri --no-rdoc -v 0.8.7 rake && \
    gem install --no-ri --no-rdoc -v 1.1.0 daemons && \
    gem install -b --no-ri --no-rdoc \
        rmagick stompserver passenger bundler

You may ask yourself why there are significantly less Gems here compared to the old guide. This is because bunder installs all those Gems automagically from the data in the Gemfile.lock

Installing the Sphinx Search Server

$ wget http://sphinxsearch.com/files/sphinx-0.9.9.tar.gz && \
    tar -xzf sphinx-0.9.9.tar.gz && \
    cd sphinx-0.9.9 && \
    ./configure --prefix=/usr && \
    make all install

Getting Gitorious

$ git clone git://gitorious.org/gitorious/mainline.git /var/www/gitorious && \
    cd /var/www/gitorious && \
    git submodule init && \
    git submodule update

Easy as pie. Now we just need to put the Gitorious binary on our path:

$ ln -s /var/www/gitorious/script/gitorious /usr/bin

Configuring services

Gitorious needs a bunch of background services, so we need to copy the supplied startup scripts:

$ cd /var/www/gitorious/doc/templates/ubuntu/ && \
    cp git-daemon git-poller git-ultrasphinx stomp /etc/init.d/ && \
    cd /etc/init.d/ && \
    chmod 755 git-daemon git-poller git-ultrasphinx stomp

and enable them:

$ update-rc.d git-daemon defaults && \
    update-rc.d git-poller defaults && \
    update-rc.d git-ultrasphinx defaults && \
    update-rc.d stomp defaults

We need to create an additional symlink, because all the startup scripts have RUBY_HOME set to /opt/ruby-enterprise (alternatively we could just patch the files, but this way it is easier and you can update the scripts if needed):

$ ln -s /usr/ /opt/ruby-enterprise

Configuring Apache

Passenger

First of all, we need to compile the Apache2 passenger module:

$ $(gem contents passenger | grep passenger-install-apache2-module)

The passenger configuration script will tell you exactly what you’ll need to add to your apache configuration. The part you need to copy looks like this (don’t use the snippet below, but use the one given to you by the passenger install script):

Please edit your Apache configuration file, and add these lines:

	LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.9/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
	PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-3.0.9
	PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby1.8

After you restart Apache, you are ready to deploy any number of Ruby on Rails
applications on Apache, without any further Ruby on Rails-specific
configuration!

These three lines need to be inserted into

/etc/apache2/mods-available/passenger.load

Enabling necessary modules

$ a2enmod passenger && \
    a2enmod rewrite && \
    a2enmod ssl

Creating the Apache2 sites

  • Create /etc/apache2/sites-available/gitorious (see files below)
  • Create /etc/apache2/sites-available/gitorious-ssl (see files below)

Now we need to disable the default site, and enable our freshly created Gitorious sites:

$ a2dissite default && \
    a2dissite default-ssl && \
    a2ensite gitorious && \
    a2ensite gitorious-ssl

Creating a MySQL user for gitorious

$ mysql -u root -p
Enter password: (your mysql root password you selected while installing the packages)
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'gitorious'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '<insert password>' WITH GRANT OPTION;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Configuring Gitorious

First of all, we need to make sure we have all gems in the correct version for Gitorious, so we run the following:

$ cd /var/www/gitorious/ && \
	bundle install && \
	bundle pack

Now we can create the user under which Gitorious will run and serve the Git repositories:

$ adduser --system --home /var/www/gitorious/ --no-create-home --group --shell /bin/bash git && \
    chown -R git:git /var/www/gitorious

Then we need to create some stuff that Gitorious needs to run:

$ su - git && \
    mkdir .ssh && \
    touch .ssh/authorized_keys && \
    chmod 700 .ssh && \
    chmod 600 .ssh/authorized_keys && \
    mkdir tmp/pids && \
    mkdir repositories && \
    mkdir tarballs

Creating the Gitorious configuration

Lets copy the sample configuration files to the correct path:

$ cp config/database.sample.yml config/database.yml && \
    cp config/gitorious.sample.yml config/gitorious.yml && \
    cp config/broker.yml.example config/broker.yml

Now edit the config/database.yml and make sure you set the correct username and password in the production section. After that, we need to set a couple of things in config/gitorious.yml:

  • Make sure you are configuring the right section (not test:, but production:)
  • repository_base_path should be /var/www/gitorious/repositories
  • cookie_secret needs to be set to a random value >= 30 characters
  • gitorious_client_port should be 80
  • gitorious_host needs to be the exact hostname that clients will use (cookies get messed up otherwise)
  • archive_cache_dir should be /var/www/gitorious/tarballs
  • archive_work_dir should be something like /tmp/tarballs-work
  • hide_http_clone_urls should be true (they require extra unknown setup to work)
  • is_gitorious_dot_org should be false

Creating the Gitorious database

Because of an incompatibility of RubyGems with Rails < 2.3.11 you need to add the following line at the top of config/boot.rb:

require 'thread'

Now we let rake do all the work for us:

$ export RAILS_ENV=production && \
    bundle exec rake db:create && \
    bundle exec rake db:migrate && \
    bundle exec rake ultrasphinx:bootstrap

Create the Sphinx Cronjob

$ crontab -e * * * * * cd /var/www/gitorious && /usr/bin/bundle exec rake ultrasphinx:index RAILS_ENV=production

Create an admin user

env RAILS_ENV=production ruby1.8 script/create_admin

Reboot

You’re finally done. Reboot your Ubuntu machine, and your Gitorious installation should be up and running. If you find an error, feel free to leave a comment and I will fix it as soon as possible :)

Files

gitorious

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName your.server.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/gitorious/public
</VirtualHost>

gitorious-ssl

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
    <VirtualHost _default_:443>
        DocumentRoot /var/www/gitorious/public
        SSLEngine on
        SSLCertificateFile    /etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem
        SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key
        BrowserMatch ".*MSIE.*" nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0
    </VirtualHost>
</IfModule>