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helm-chart/docs/ha-setup.md

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High Availability

All components (in-memory DB, volume/asset storage, code indexer) used by Gitea must be deployed in a HA-ready fashion to achieve a full HA-ready Gitea deployment. The following document explains how to achieve this for all individual components.

The resulting Gitea deployment will consist of ~ 10 pods (depending on the chosen components and their replicas). One should evaluate upfront whether a HA-deployment is required as switching between HA/non-HA comes with some effort. For production instances, HA is always recommended to increase uptime and have a frictionless update process.

A general comment about chart dependencies and external services: Instead of relying on chart dependencies, it is often better to rely on an external, (managed) instances (in-memory database, asset storage provider, database, etc.). Many cloud providers offer such services, at least for databases or in-memory databases. They might cost a bit more than using a self-hosted k8s variant but are usually easier to maintain and scale, if needed. Also they can be centrally managed and are not linked to the Gitea helm chart or namespace. Please consider using external services before you start with your Gitea HA setup, it will make your life (and the life of the Gitea maintainers) easier.

This helm chart tries to help as much as possible to simplify and assert the provisioning of a HA-ready Gitea instance by implementing smart conditionals if replicaCount is set to a value > 1. Nevertheless, we cannot guarantee for every possible combination of Gitea settings to work together perfectly in a HA setup. As a general advice, we recommend to have a test environment aside on which to test possible changes/upgrades before applying these to a production installation.

Requirements for HA

Storage-wise, the HA-Gitea setup requires a RWX file-system which can be shared among the deployment-based replica pods. In addition, the following components are required for full HA-readiness:

  • A HA-ready issue (and optionally code) indexer: elasticsearch or meilisearch
  • A HA-ready external object/asset storage (minio) (optional, assets can also be stored on the RWX file-system)
  • A HA-ready cache (redis-cluster)
  • A HA-ready DB

postgres.enabled, which default to true, must be set to false for a HA setup. The default postgres chart dependency is not HA-ready (there's a dedicated postgres-ha chart).

The following sections discuss each of the components in more detail. Note that for each component discussed, the shown configurations only provides a (working) starting point, not necessarily the most optimal setup. We try to optimize this document over time as we have gained more experience with HA setups from users.

Indexers (Issues and code/repo)

The default code indexer bleve is not able to allow multiple connections and hence cannot be used in a HA setup. Alternatives are elasticsearch and meilisearch (as of >= 1.19.2). Unless you have an existing elasticsearch cluster, we recommend using meilisearch as it is faster and requires way less resources.

Unfortunately, meilisearch does only support the ISSUE_INDEXER and not the REPO_INDEXER yet (tracking issue). This means that the REPO_INDEXER must still be disabled for a HA setup right now. An alternative to the two options above for the ISSUE_INDEXER is "db", however we recommend to just go with meilisearch in this case and to not bother the DB with indexing.

To configure meilisearch within Gitea, do the following:

gitea:
  config:
    indexer:
      ISSUE_INDEXER_CONN_STR: <http://meilisearch.<namespace>.svc.cluster.local:7700>
      ISSUE_INDEXER_ENABLED: true
      ISSUE_INDEXER_TYPE: meilisearch
      REPO_INDEXER_ENABLED: false
      # REPO_INDEXER_TYPE: meilisearch # not yet working

Unfortunately meilisearch cannot be deployed in HA as of now. Nevertheless it allows for multiple Gitea requests at the same time and is therefore required in a HA setup.

Exemplary configuration for the meilisearch-kubernetes chart:

persistence:
  enabled: true
  accessMode: ReadWriteOnce
  size: 5Gi

Cache, session and queue

A redis instance is required for the in-memory cache. Two options exist:

  • redis
  • redis-cluster

The chart provides redis-cluster as a dependency as this one can be used for both HA and non-HA setups. You're also welcome to go with redis if you prefer or already have a running instance.

It should be noted that redis-cluster support is only available starting with Gitea 1.19.2. You can also configure an external (managed) redis instance to be used. To do so, you need to set the following configuration values yourself:

  • gitea.config.queue.TYPE: redis`

  • gitea.config.queue.CONN_STR: <your redis connection string>

  • gitea.config.session.PROVIDER: redis

  • gitea.config.session.PROVIDER_CONFIG: <your redis connection string>

  • gitea.config.cache.ENABLED: true

  • gitea.config.cache.ADAPTER: redis

  • gitea.config.cache.HOST: <your redis connection string>

By default, the redis-cluster chart provisions three standalone master nodes of which each has a single replica. To reduce the number of pods for a default Gitea deployment, we opted to omit the replicas (replicas: 0) by default. Only the minimum required number of master pods for a functional redis-cluster deployment are provisioned. For a "proper" redis-cluster setup however, we recommend to set replicas: 1 and nodes: 6.

Object and asset storage

Object/asset storage refers to the storage of attachments, avatars, LFS files, etc. While most of these can be stored on the RWX file-system, it is recommended to use an external S3-compatible object storage for such, mainly for performance reasons.

By default the chart provisions a single RWO volume to store everything (repos, avatars, packages, etc.). This volume cannot be mounted by multiple pods. Hence, a RWX volume is required and (optionally) an external HA-ready object storage.

Note: Double-check that the file permissions are set correctly on the RWX volume! That is everything should be owned by the git user which usually has uid=1000 and gid=1000.

To use minio you need to deploy and configure an external minio instance yourself and explicitly define the STORAGE_TYPE values as shown below.

Note that MINIO_BUCKET here is just a name and does not refer to a S3 bucket. It's the root access point for all objects belonging to the respective application, i.e., to Gitea in this case.

gitea:
  config:
    attachment:
      STORAGE_TYPE: minio
    lfs:
      STORAGE_TYPE: minio
    picture:
      AVATAR_STORAGE_TYPE: minio
    "storage.packages":
      STORAGE_TYPE: minio

    storage:
      MINIO_ENDPOINT: <minio-headless.<namespace>.svc.cluster.local:9000>
      MINIO_LOCATION: <location>
      MINIO_ACCESS_KEY_ID: <access key>
      MINIO_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: <secret key>
      MINIO_BUCKET: <bucket name>
      MINIO_USE_SSL: false

Exemplary configuration for the bitnami minio chart:

auth:
  rootUser: minio
mode: distributed
replicaCount: 4
persistence:
  enabled: true
  size: 20Gi
  accessModes:
    - ReadWriteOnce

Database

If you do not have an HA-ready DB, using a managed database service in the cloud might be the easiest and most robust solution. Remember: disable the built-in postgres dependency and configure the database connection manually via gitea.config.database:

gitea:
  database:
    builtIn:
      postgresql:
        enabled: false
  config:
    database:
      DB_TYPE: postgres
      HOST: <host>
      NAME: <name>
      USER: <user>

Known issues

  • Currently Cron jobs are run on all replicas as no leader election is implemented. See https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/13791 for a discussion and possible solution.

  • Running with multiple replicas slows down Gitea a bit, i.e. page loading time increases.