Maintenance Rake tasks

GitLab provides Rake tasks for general maintenance.

Gather GitLab and system information

This command gathers information about your GitLab installation and the system it runs on. These may be useful when asking for help or reporting issues.

Omnibus Installation 

sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:env:info

Source Installation 

bundle exec rake gitlab:env:info RAILS_ENV=production

Example output: 

System information
System:         Ubuntu 20.04
Proxy:          no
Current User:   git
Using RVM:      no
Ruby Version:   2.6.6p146
Gem Version:    2.7.10
Bundler Version:1.17.3
Rake Version:   12.3.3
Redis Version:  5.0.9
Git Version:    2.27.0
Sidekiq Version:5.2.9
Go Version:     unknown

GitLab information
Version:        13.2.2-ee
Revision:       618883a1f9d
Directory:      /opt/gitlab/embedded/service/gitlab-rails
DB Adapter:     PostgreSQL
DB Version:     11.7
URL:            http://gitlab.example.com
HTTP Clone URL: http://gitlab.example.com/some-group/some-project.git
SSH Clone URL:  git@gitlab.example.com:some-group/some-project.git
Elasticsearch:  no
Geo:            no
Using LDAP:     no
Using Omniauth: yes
Omniauth Providers:

GitLab Shell
Version:    13.3.0
Repository storage paths:
- default:  /var/opt/gitlab/git-data/repositories
GitLab Shell path:      /opt/gitlab/embedded/service/gitlab-shell

Show GitLab license information

Version history

This command shows information about your GitLab license and how many seats are used. It is only available on GitLab Enterprise installations: a license cannot be installed into GitLab Community Edition.

These may be useful when raising tickets with Support, or for programmatically checking your license parameters.

Omnibus Installation 

sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:license:info

Source Installation 

bundle exec rake gitlab:license:info RAILS_ENV=production

Example output: 

Today's Date: 2020-02-29
Current User Count: 30
Max Historical Count: 30
Max Users in License: 40
License valid from: 2019-11-29 to 2020-11-28
Email associated with license: user@example.com

Check GitLab configuration

The gitlab:check Rake task runs the following Rake tasks:

  • gitlab:gitlab_shell:check
  • gitlab:gitaly:check
  • gitlab:sidekiq:check
  • gitlab:app:check

It checks that each component was set up according to the installation guide and suggest fixes for issues found. This command must be run from your application server and doesn’t work correctly on component servers like Gitaly.

You may also have a look at our troubleshooting guides for:

To run gitlab:check, run:

Omnibus Installation 

sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:check

Source Installation 

bundle exec rake gitlab:check RAILS_ENV=production

Use SANITIZE=true for gitlab:check if you want to omit project names from the output.

Example output: 

Checking Environment ...

Git configured for git user? ... yes
Has python2? ... yes
python2 is supported version? ... yes

Checking Environment ... Finished

Checking GitLab Shell ...

GitLab Shell version? ... OK (1.2.0)
Repo base directory exists? ... yes
Repo base directory is a symlink? ... no
Repo base owned by git:git? ... yes
Repo base access is drwxrws---? ... yes
post-receive hook up-to-date? ... yes
post-receive hooks in repos are links: ... yes

Checking GitLab Shell ... Finished

Checking Sidekiq ...

Running? ... yes

Checking Sidekiq ... Finished

Checking GitLab ...

Database config exists? ... yes
Database is SQLite ... no
All migrations up? ... yes
GitLab config exists? ... yes
GitLab config outdated? ... no
Log directory writable? ... yes
Tmp directory writable? ... yes
Init script exists? ... yes
Init script up-to-date? ... yes
Redis version >= 2.0.0? ... yes

Checking GitLab ... Finished

Rebuild authorized_keys file

In some case it is necessary to rebuild the authorized_keys file. To do this, run:

Omnibus Installation 

sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:shell:setup

Source Installation 

cd /home/git/gitlab
sudo -u git -H bundle exec rake gitlab:shell:setup RAILS_ENV=production

Example output: 

This will rebuild an authorized_keys file.
You will lose any data stored in authorized_keys file.
Do you want to continue (yes/no)? yes

Clear Redis cache

If for some reason the dashboard displays the wrong information, you might want to clear Redis’ cache. To do this, run:

Omnibus Installation 

sudo gitlab-rake cache:clear

Source Installation 

cd /home/git/gitlab
sudo -u git -H bundle exec rake cache:clear RAILS_ENV=production

Precompile the assets

Sometimes during version upgrades you might end up with some wrong CSS or missing some icons. In that case, try to precompile the assets again.

This only applies to source installations and does NOT apply to Omnibus packages.

Source Installation 

cd /home/git/gitlab
sudo -u git -H bundle exec rake gitlab:assets:compile RAILS_ENV=production

For omnibus versions, the unoptimized assets (JavaScript, CSS) are frozen at the release of upstream GitLab. The omnibus version includes optimized versions of those assets. Unless you are modifying the JavaScript / CSS code on your production machine after installing the package, there should be no reason to redo rake gitlab:assets:compile on the production machine. If you suspect that assets have been corrupted, you should reinstall the omnibus package.

Check TCP connectivity to a remote site

Sometimes you need to know if your GitLab installation can connect to a TCP service on another machine (for example a PostgreSQL or web server) in order to troubleshoot proxy issues. A Rake task is included to help you with this.

Omnibus Installation 

sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:tcp_check[example.com,80]

Source Installation 

cd /home/git/gitlab
sudo -u git -H bundle exec rake gitlab:tcp_check[example.com,80] RAILS_ENV=production

Clear exclusive lease (DANGER)

GitLab uses a shared lock mechanism: ExclusiveLease to prevent simultaneous operations in a shared resource. An example is running periodic garbage collection on repositories.

In very specific situations, a operation locked by an Exclusive Lease can fail without releasing the lock. If you can’t wait for it to expire, you can run this task to manually clear it.

To clear all exclusive leases:

cautionDon’t run it while GitLab or Sidekiq is running
sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:exclusive_lease:clear

To specify a lease type or lease type + id, specify a scope: 

# to clear all leases for repository garbage collection:
sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:exclusive_lease:clear[project_housekeeping:*]

# to clear a lease for repository garbage collection in a specific project: (id=4)
sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:exclusive_lease:clear[project_housekeeping:4]

Display status of database migrations

See the upgrade documentation for how to check that migrations are complete when upgrading GitLab.

To check the status of specific migrations, you can use the following Rake task: 

sudo gitlab-rake db:migrate:status

This outputs a table with a Status of up or down for each Migration ID. 

database: gitlabhq_production

 Status   Migration ID    Migration Name
--------------------------------------------------
   up     migration_id    migration_name

Run incomplete database migrations

Database migrations can be stuck in an incomplete state, with a down status in the output of the sudo gitlab-rake db:migrate:status command.

To complete these migrations, use the following Rake task: 

sudo gitlab-rake db:migrate

After the command completes, run sudo gitlab-rake db:migrate:status to check if all migrations are completed (have an up status).

Rebuild database indexes

cautionThis is an experimental feature that isn’t enabled by default.

Database indexes can be rebuilt regularly to reclaim space and maintain healthy levels of index bloat over time.

In order to rebuild the two indexes with the highest estimated bloat, use the following Rake task: 

sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:db:reindex

In order to target a specific index, use the following Rake task: 

sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:db:reindex['public.a_specific_index']

The following index types are not supported:

  1. Unique and primary key indexes
  2. Indexes used for constraint exclusion
  3. Partitioned indexes
  4. Expression indexes

Optionally, this Rake task sends annotations to a Grafana (4.6 or later) endpoint. Use the following custom environment variables in order to enable annotations:

  1. GRAFANA_API_URL - Grafana’s base URL, for example http://some-host:3000.
  2. GRAFANA_API_KEY - Grafana API key with at least Editor role.

You can also enable reindexing as a regular cron job.

Import common metrics

Sometimes you may need to re-import the common metrics that power the Metrics dashboards.

This could be as a result of updating existing metrics, or as a troubleshooting measure.

To re-import the metrics you can run: 

sudo gitlab-rake metrics:setup_common_metrics