How do Droplet images work? Where's the stuff?

October 4, 2014 1.5k views
Arturo
By:
Arturo

Hi there,

first of all I'm new here, I just started a Droplet with a GitLab Image and everything works as expected. I can use GitLab with no problems.

I accessed the Droplet via SSH to add a user, maybe add a static page with nginx but I found nothing. There's no git, no ruby, no nginx installed.

I tried

$ git --version
$ which --version
$ which ruby

etc. but there's nothing. None of the GitLab requirements.

How can that be? Where's the stuff? What am I missing?

Thanks a lot.

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1 Answer
asb MOD October 6, 2014

Exact same question, word for word, so I hope you don't mind an identical response.

The GitLab one-click app uses GitLab's "omnibus" installation. The files for GitLab are found under /opt/gitlab/, this includes bundled version of Ruby and git that are not part of the system-wide install. It's designed to be tightly integrated with GitLab managing the services using the gitlab-ctl scripts.

This article runs through all the details:

How To Use the GitLab One-Click Install Image to Manage Git Repositories
by Justin Ellingwood
Git is the most popular distributed version control system in the world. GitLab is a git repository management system that can be used to mange repositories, users, access, and issues from within an easy-to-use web interface. In this article, we will cover how to use DigitalOcean's one-click GitLab installation image.
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  • Arturo October 6, 2014

    Thanks @asb for replying. I don't mind the same answer at all (in fact that person copy/pasted my question, you can check the publish date.)

    So if I install git system-wide will that conflict with the one in /opt/gitlab/? Are these bundled version protected?

    Thanks again.

  • asb MOD October 7, 2014

    You can install the git package from the repositories and use it if you want. GitLab itself won't use though. If you're concerned about disk space and don't want to duplicate it, you could use /opt/gitlab/embedded/bin/git directly.

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