Off topic anecdote on installing GitLab.

My university asked me to install GitLab on a 32bit Dell Server made circa ~2002 while I was a teaching assistant, because we were conducting a hands-on class of reimplementing TCP/IP and IT wanted everything we were doing airgapped off the school network.

Unfortunately the omnibus package is 64bit-only so I had to build from source... which was pretty hard. But I was only able to do that after figuring out how to upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 to 16.04 with the only input being a CD (not even DVD) drive. I don’t remember why OTA upgrade was failing, I think the version was too old. Managed to get Ubuntu 12.04 or something thinned down enough to fit on a CD. From which network upgrade worked.

Whole process took ~20 hours over a few days. Craziest install I’ve ever had to do... University would have saved a bunch of money if they had just bought us a new small 64Bit server. Ah well.

The Omnibus package is literally a one line install.

Historically their upgrades cause issues; I remember the time I upgraded our self-hosted installation and LDAP logins were broken, for example.

I've never seen anyone complain about the updates, in my own experience you can always update on day one without any issues.

I installed it within 5 minutes locally. If anything, Gitlab is perfect to quickly set up code repositories in environments where on-prem is a hard requirement.

Perhaps it has gotten better. My experience was a few years ago.