I started running GitLab CE inside of an x86 Debian VM locally about two years ago, and last year I decided to migrate the GitLab CE instance to a dedicated Intel NUC server. Everything appeared to go well with no issues, and my GitLab CE instance is up-to-date as of today (running 13.4.2).
I discovered recently though, that some repos that were moved give a "NO REPOSITORY!" error when visiting their project pages, and if they had any issue boards, merge requests, etc, that these were also gone. But you wouldn't suspect it since the broken repos appear in the repo lists along with working repos that I use all the time.
If I had to reason about these broken repos, it would be that they had their last activity over a year ago, with either no pushes ever made to them other than an initial push, or if changes were made, issues created, or merge requests created, it was literally over a year ago.
Some of these broken repos are rather large with a lot of history, whereas others are super tiny (literally just tracking changes to a shell script), so I don't think repo size itself has anything to do with it.
If I run the GitLab diagnostic check sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:check
, everything looks good except for "hashed storage":
All projects are in hashed storage? ... no
Try fixing it:
Please migrate all projects to hashed storage
But then running sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:storage:migrate_to_hashed
doesn't appear to complete (with something like six failed jobs in the dashboard), and running the "gitlab:check" again still indicates this "hashed storage" problem. I've also tried running sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:git:fsck
and sudo gitlab-rake cache:clear
but these commands don't seem to make a difference.
Luckily I have the latest versions of all the missing repos on my machine, and in fact, I still have the original VM running GitLab CE 12.8.5 (with slightly out of date copies of the repos.)
So my questions are:
- Is it possible to "repair" the broken repos on my current instance? I suspect I could just "re-push" my local copies of these repos back up to my server, but I really don't want to lose any metadata like issues / merge requests and such.
- Is there any way to resolve the "not all projects are in hashed storage" issue? (Again the
migrate_to_hashed
task fails to complete.) - Would I be able to do something like "backup", "inspect / tweak backup", "restore backup" kind of thing to fix the broken repos, or at least the metadata?
Thanks in advance.
Okay, so I think I figured out what happened.
I found this thread on the GitLab User Forums.
Apparently the scenario here is:
The fix is to:
sudo gitlab-rake gitlab:storage:migrate_to_hashed
processsudo gitlab-rake gitlab:check
to ensure the output contains the message:If successful, the projects that stated "NO REPOSITORY!" should now be fully restored.
A key to know if you need to run this process is if you:
with the error