gitlab-foss/doc/administration/cells.md

stage, group, info, title

stage	group	info	title
Tenant Scale	Cells Infrastructure	Any user with at least the Maintainer role can merge updates to this content. For details, see https://docs.gitlab.com/development/development_processes/#development-guidelines-review.	Cells

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• Offering: GitLab.com
• Status: Experiment

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This feature is available for administrators of GitLab.com only. This feature is not available for GitLab Self-Managed or GitLab Dedicated instances.

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Cells 1.0 is in development. For more information about the state of cell development, see epic 12383.

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To test cell functionality, configure the GitLab Rails console.

Configuration

To configure your GitLab instance as a Cell instance:

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The cells related configuration in config/gitlab.yml is in this format:

  cell:
    enabled: true
    id: 1
    database:
      skip_sequence_alteration: false
    topology_service_client:
      address: topology-service.gitlab.example.com:443
      ca_file: /home/git/gitlab/config/topology-service-ca.pem
      certificate_file: /home/git/gitlab/config/topology-service-cert.pem
      private_key_file: /home/git/gitlab/config/topology-service-key.pem

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1. Edit /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb and add the following lines:

   gitlab_rails['cell'] = {
     enabled: true,
     id: 1,
     database: {
       skip_sequence_alteration: false
     },
     topology_service_client: {
       enabled: true,
       address: 'topology-service.gitlab.example.com:443',
       ca_file: 'path/to/your/ca/.pem',
       certificate_file: 'path/to/your/cert/.pem',
       private_key_file: 'path/to/your/key/.pem'
     }
   }
   

2. Reconfigure and restart GitLab:

   sudo gitlab-ctl reconfigure
   sudo gitlab-ctl restart
   

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1. Edit gitlab_values.yaml:

   global:
     appConfig:
       cell:
         enabled: true
         id: 1
         database:
           skipSequenceAlteration: false
         topologyServiceClient:
           address: "topology-service.gitlab.example.com:443"
           tls:
             enabled: true
   

2. Save the file and apply the new values:

   helm upgrade -f gitlab_values.yaml gitlab gitlab/gitlab
   

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Configuration	Default value	Description
cell.enabled	false	To configure whether the instance is a Cell or not. false means all Cell features are disabled. session_cookie_prefix_token is not affected, and can be set separately.
cell.id	nil	Required to be a positive integer when cell.enabled is true. Otherwise, it must be nil. This is the unique integer identifier for the cell in a cluster. This ID is used inside the routable tokens. When cell.id is nil, the other attributes inside the routable tokens, like organization_id will still be used
cell.database.skip_sequence_alteration	false	When true, skips database sequence alteration for the cell. Enable for the legacy cell (cell-1) before the monolith cell is available for use, being tracked in this epic: Phase 6: Monolith Cell.
cell.topology_service_client.address	"topology-service.gitlab.example.com:443"	Required when cell.enabled is true. Address and port of the topology service server.
cell.topology_service_client.tls.enabled	true	When true, enables mTLS for communication with the topology service. This requires the cell.topology_service_client.tls.secret to be properly configured. If set to false, the connection will be made without TLS encryption.
cell.topology_service_client.tls.secret	nil	Kubernetes TLS Secret name that contains the mTLS credentials. Required when TLS is enabled. The secret must include tls.crt and tls.key keys. If not explicitly set, defaults to <release.name>-topology-tls. This secret must be created manually; the Helm chart does not create it automatically.

Related configuration

For information on how to configure other components of the cells architecture, see:

1. Topology service configuration
2. HTTP router configuration