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It is also worth nothing that over time, the omnibus-gitlab package has benefited greatly from being used to deploy to GitLab.com. As we migrate more of the workloads into kubernetes using the charts, we expect to see some of the same benefits and insights there. See our handbook for more details on how we use dogfooding: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/#dogfooding

The omnibus package is similar to the nixos way of things, except focused on one application rather than the whole system. Once the package is installed, it uses a configuration file, and a set of Chef cookbooks/recipes[0] to configure the individual components.

So yes, Gitaly does come with it's own configuration file that needs to be managed. It does use the same paths as the main gitlab-rails application, so our cookbook has a method to convert the configuration of one to the other[1]

[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/blob/master/fil...

[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/blob/master/fil...

Thanks for the feedback. I'm on the build team here at GitLab, and we try and keep installation as easy as we can, but GitLab is a complicated application.

One of the benefits of the omnibus package, is that all configuration is done through a central gitlab.rb file. So the different configuration formats for the individual services is not noticeable to the administrator. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily translate to source installations.

We try and provide good documentation for building from source when our omnibus package or docker image isn't an option: https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/install/installation.html. Any feedback on issues you might have following this guide is welcome. I don't know that we can fix the different configuration formats, but we should be able to fix hardcoded paths. Any examples you could provide would be appreciated.

We do provide docker images for those on operating systems we do not support. https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/docker/. If you're just looking to run the latest version, this might be the easiest way for you to proceed.