gitlab-ce/doc/administration/environment_variables.md

Environment Variables

GitLab exposes certain environment variables which can be used to override their defaults values.

People usually configure GitLab via /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb for Omnibus installations, or gitlab.yml for installations from source.

Below you will find the supported environment variables which you can use to override certain values.

Supported environment variables

Variable	Type	Description
GITLAB_ROOT_PASSWORD	string	Sets the password for the root user on installation
GITLAB_HOST	string	The full URL of the GitLab server (including http:// or https://)
RAILS_ENV	string	The Rails environment; can be one of production, development, staging or test
DATABASE_URL	string	The database URL; is of the form: postgresql://localhost/blog_development
GITLAB_EMAIL_FROM	string	The e-mail address used in the "From" field in e-mails sent by GitLab
GITLAB_EMAIL_DISPLAY_NAME	string	The name used in the "From" field in e-mails sent by GitLab
GITLAB_EMAIL_REPLY_TO	string	The e-mail address used in the "Reply-To" field in e-mails sent by GitLab
GITLAB_EMAIL_REPLY_TO	string	The e-mail address used in the "Reply-To" field in e-mails sent by GitLab
GITLAB_EMAIL_SUBJECT_SUFFIX	string	The e-mail subject suffix used in e-mails sent by GitLab
GITLAB_UNICORN_MEMORY_MIN	integer	The minimum memory threshold (in bytes) for the Unicorn worker killer
GITLAB_UNICORN_MEMORY_MAX	integer	The maximum memory threshold (in bytes) for the Unicorn worker killer

Complete database variables

The recommended way of specifying your database connection information is to set the DATABASE_URL environment variable. This variable only holds connection information (adapter, database, username, password, host and port), but not behavior information (encoding, pool). If you don't want to use DATABASE_URL and/or want to set database behavior information, you will have to either:

• copy our template file: cp config/database.yml.env config/database.yml, or
• set a value for some GITLAB_DATABASE_XXX variables

The list of GITLAB_DATABASE_XXX variables that you can set is:

Variable	Default value	Overridden by DATABASE_URL?
GITLAB_DATABASE_ADAPTER	postgresql (for MySQL use mysql2)	Yes
GITLAB_DATABASE_DATABASE	gitlab_#{ENV['RAILS_ENV']	Yes
GITLAB_DATABASE_USERNAME	root	Yes
GITLAB_DATABASE_PASSWORD	None	Yes
GITLAB_DATABASE_HOST	localhost	Yes
GITLAB_DATABASE_PORT	5432	Yes
GITLAB_DATABASE_ENCODING	unicode	No
GITLAB_DATABASE_POOL	10	No

Adding more variables

We welcome merge requests to make more settings configurable via variables. Please make changes in the config/initializers/1_settings.rb file and stick to the naming scheme GITLAB_#{name in 1_settings.rb in upper case}.

Omnibus configuration

It's possible to preconfigure the GitLab docker image by adding the environment variable GITLAB_OMNIBUS_CONFIG to the docker run command. For more information see the 'preconfigure-docker-container' section in the Omnibus documentation.