Gitlabs droplet for other uses

I’d recommend spinning up another temporary GitLab instance to do some testing first. It will allow you to break things without worrying about your production instance. Since you’re only charged for what you use, it will only cost pennies to do a few hours of testing.

In general, one thing to be aware of is that the GitLab one-click app uses their “omnibus” installation. It’s really designed to run in a self contained manner and installs it own libraries including Nginx under /opt that are managed using Chef. So you’ll need to override some things in /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb To use the system Nginx that you plan on installing, add:

nginx['enable'] = false
web_server['external_users'] = ['www-data']

Then reconfigure GitLab with: sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure

Then install Nginx as normal and set up a proxy pass to serve GitLab through it. Your Nginx configuration will need something like:

upstream gitlab {
    server unix:/var/opt/gitlab/gitlab-rails/sockets/gitlab.socket;
}

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on;

    root /usr/share/nginx/html;
    index index.html index.htm;
    server_name localhost;

    location / {
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
        proxy_redirect off;
        proxy_pass http://gitlab;
    }
}