BosphorusISS Google Cloud & Gitlab Adventure— 1 — VM Setup

Previous Post: Adventure 0

1. Get Google Cloud Platform Free Trial

• Login to Console Cloud address.
• You will see a notification at the top of the page, if you didn’t already activate your free trial before. Click on that button and activate your subscription.

Google Cloud Free Trial Notification

• Please select your country and check required approvals.
• Google will ask you for additional information to verify your identity. You have to provide a valid credit/debit card as well.
• There is not much to worry about, Google does not charge anything to the card during the trial period. It’ll ask you when your trial ends or free credits run out.

Additional Account Information

• If you provide all required fields, google will load 300$ into your account. This is good amount of money to get used to Google Cloud and try services before buying.

• We’re ready to use services.

2. Get A VM To Deploy Gitlab

• A Virtual Machine is needed for setting up your own Gitlab instance.
• Follow “Compute Engine -> VM Instances” section on the left pane/menu then click “Create Instances” button.
• We’re going to deploy Gitlab-EE( According to Gitlab’s document we should have at least 4GB Ram ) on that VM. Here is are the configurations:

VM Properties

• You can access your VM via SSH button after creating machine. Be careful on IP address. You’ll use this address to reach the services like gitlab, registry, external ssh etc.

VM Instance

3. Install Docker & Docker Compose

• As said before, Gitlab will be deployed on Docker Containers. Containers were chosen because of the following reasons:

* Easy container update. Update gitlab version in a few seconds.

* Establish and isolated environment for Gitlab

* Easy transition from plain Dockers to Kubernetes in the future.

3.1 Install Docker

• Follow the official installation document.
• We choose a debian machine so we continued with debian section. Please choose suitable installation guide for your environment.

Docker Installation

• Docker was installed.

3.2 Docker Compose Install

• We choose docker-compose to manage our gitlab configurations from one file and leverage easy start/stop docker containers.
• We followed official document again.

• Docker-compose was installed.

We prepared our new environment to jump up to the next stages. We’ll install other required tools and gitlab.

Next Topic: Deploy a Working Gitlab-EE on that VM.