Configure GitLab using an external PostgreSQL service

If you're hosting GitLab on a cloud provider, you can optionally use a managed service for PostgreSQL. For example, AWS offers a managed Relational Database Service (RDS) that runs PostgreSQL.

Alternatively, you may opt to manage your own PostgreSQL instance or cluster separate from the Omnibus GitLab package.

If you use a cloud-managed service, or provide your own PostgreSQL instance:

1. Set up PostgreSQL according to the database requirements document.

2. Set up a gitlab user with a password of your choice, create the gitlabhq_production database, and make the user an owner of the database. You can see an example of this setup in the installation from source documentation.

3. If you are using a cloud-managed service, you may need to grant additional roles to your gitlab user:

   • Amazon RDS requires the rds_superuser role.
   • Azure Database for PostgreSQL requires the azure_pg_admin role.

4. Configure the GitLab application servers with the appropriate connection details for your external PostgreSQL service in your /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb file:

   # Disable the bundled Omnibus provided PostgreSQL
   postgresql['enable'] = false
   
   # PostgreSQL connection details
   gitlab_rails['db_adapter'] = 'postgresql'
   gitlab_rails['db_encoding'] = 'unicode'
   gitlab_rails['db_host'] = '10.1.0.5' # IP/hostname of database server
   gitlab_rails['db_password'] = 'DB password'

   For more information on GitLab multi-node setups, refer to the reference architectures.

5. Reconfigure for the changes to take effect:

   sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure