So far, I managed to deploy GitLab on a Fedora 19 machine using only packaged gems either from the official repos or a custom one I have created.

Below you will find some more info as well as the url of the testing environment. You can use/test it and report any issues here. If anyone needs an admin account for further testing just let me know. Just bare in mind that you might see some 500 errors as I will be trying some things.

More or less, here is the workflow I followed:

1. Set up GitLab in a VM following the official installation guide and test everything works
2. rm -rf /vendor/bundle
3. Test with bundle install --local RAILS_ENV=production
4. See the dependency differences
5. Install with yum the gems in Gemfile
6. Replace in Gemfile/Gemfile.lock with Fedora versions
7. Repeat steps 3,4,5,6

For details on what is replaced see this Gemfile.lock.diff. The systemd services I used can be found here.

There are a lot to be done yet until this reaches to the official repos but that's a start.

TODO

Short term

• Write the gitlab.spec that will glue all the dependencies together

Long term

• Commit as many specs as possible to BZ.
• GitLab forks: one option is to patch upstream with GitLab's changes. Second but rather avoided is to to ask FPC for an exception and package the forks as they are.
• Coordinate efforts with Debian ruby team (related discussion)
• Deploy on rawhide: when GitLab supports rails 4. That depends on many dependencies gems as well.

Longer term

• port to EPEL