A Tale of Struggling to Restore the gitlab-ce Docker Version

0. The Situation

While upgrading the Ubuntu server running gitlab (16.04 LTS to 18.04 LTS), the upgrade failed and the server blew up. Recovery was impossible. So I just formatted it and did a clean install of Ubuntu. Then I tried to restore the backed-up data following the article I wrote. But a problem cropped up.

1. The Symptom

The gitlab service wouldn’t come up. When I checked the status of the gitlab container in docker, it wasn’t starting and kept restarting endlessly.

2. The Cause

I dug into the log of the gitlab container.

sudo docker logs gitlab 

After checking, it turned out the error occurred because the gitlab version of the docker image and the gitlab version of the backup data were different.

3. The Solution

Match the version of the gitlab docker image to the backup data. Since I’m using docker-compose, I just needed to modify the image part of the yml file. Just align the image tag with the version of the backup data.

Here’s an example.

web:
  image: 'gitlab/gitlab-ce:11.11.0-ce.0' # Set tag!
#   ...

4. Wrapping Up

Once the recovery is done, be sure to change the docker-compose image tag back to latest, then update gitlab.

When the recovery didn’t work right away, I was extremely alarmed for a moment. Many people installed gitlab by following my blog, so what would happen if recovery failed? Fortunately I solved it easily, but it made me realize that I need a certain sense of responsibility as a development blogger.

Anyway, it works fine now. The end!