Installation
Gitaly and gRPC vs. FreeBSD
We cannot use our standard platform, FreeBSD, because Gitaly uses gRPC. Gitaly is an RPC mechanism which exposes git via RPC either locally or over a network. The end goal of Gitaly is to make git calls faster through caching (when available) but also to avoid the overhead of NFS. Even though it is designed primarily for network use, it should still provide at least some performance enhancement when everything is running in localhost mode.
While the goal of Gitaly is grand, the implementation leaves a bit to be desired, specifically the use of gRPC. Google appears to have designed gPRC specifically to not build on FreeBSD. However, there is a way to install the gRPC library on FreeBSD through the Ports Collection, in devel/grpc. Unfortunately, the ruby gem for gRPC does not check if this library exists. Rather, the gem compiler will always build the gRPC library for use in wrapping it to make a Ruby Native Extension. Due to the fact the gem does not check to see if the gRPC library is already installed, it cannot be built on a FreeBSD system. Worse still, the gRPC team and/or Google does not consider FreeBSD a priority.
GitLab CI and Docker
We are now using the Docker runner in GitLab CI. Please note, however, not all images contain all the tools required for a specific build. This is because Docker and the Docker Community build generic images. Most of our Maven projects require git as part of the build and/or versioning process. To overcome this, it is possible to build custom Docker images. See the DockerHelper/maven project as an example. For more information, see Docker Config