GitLab is developed for the Linux operating system.
GitLab officially supports (recent versions of) these Linux distributions:
- Ubuntu Linux
- Debian/GNU Linux
It should also work on (though they are not officially supported):
- Arch
- CentOS
- Fedora
- Gentoo
- RedHat
There is nothing that prevents GitLab from running on other Unix operating systems. This means you may get it to work on systems running FreeBSD or OS X. If you want to try, please proceed with caution!
GitLab 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 GitLab.
GitLab requires Ruby (MRI) 1.9.3 and several Gems with native components. While it is generally possible to use other Rubies (like JRuby or Rubinius) it might require some work on your part.
We recommend a processor with 4 cores. At a minimum you need a processor with 2 cores to responsively run an unmodified installation.
- 512MB is too little memory, GitLab will be very slow and you will need 250MB of swap
- 768MB is the minimal memory size and supports up to 100 users
- 1GB is the recommended memory size and supports up to 1,000 users
- 1.5GB supports up to 10,000 users
The necessary hard drive space largely depends on the size of the repos you want to store in GitLab. But as a rule of thumb you should have at least twice as much free space as your all repos combined take up. You need twice the storage because GitLab satellites contain an extra copy of each repo. 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 GitLab 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 GitLab.
If you have troubles installing GitLab following the official installation guide or want to share your experience installing GitLab on a not officially supported platform, please follow the the contribution guide.