I saw a few old posts but none had the same issues.

I'm trying to setup GitLab on Arch. I followed the wiki and everything went fine until this step:

su - gitlab -s /bin/sh -c "cd '/usr/share/webapps/gitlab'; bundle-2.3 exec rake gitlab:setup RAILS_ENV=production"

That gives this error:

Failed to connect to Gitaly...
Error: 14:Connect Failed

Gitaly failed for a few reasons.

Directory /run/gitlab (where /var/lib/gitlab/sockets points) didn't exist and every time I created it and attempted to start GitLab services it would disappear. I ended up just removing the symlink and creating the directory under a literal /var/lib/gitlab/sockets, and then at least gitaly would start, but it would depend on a failing gitlab-unicorn.

gitlab-unicorn gave a few configuration errors. Logging directories were not symlinked at first. Then <LoadError: cannot load such file -- /var/lib/gitlab/config/boot>, and <LoadError: No such file to load -- /var/lib/gitlab/lib/gitlab/redis/wrapper> both of which I had to also provide through a symlink.

Then I got this error: /var/lib/gitlab/config/initializers/1_settings.rb:475:in '<top (required)>': uninitialized constant ApplicationSetting (NameError)

In /var/lib/gitlab/config/initializers/1_settings.rbapplication.rb I commented out the last line causing it:

# Force a refresh of application settings at startup
#ApplicationSetting.expire

And now I get this one:

/var/lib/gitlab/lib/gitlab/shell.rb:38:in 'read': No such file or directory @ rb_sysopen - /var/lib/gitlab/GITLAB_SHELL_VERSION (Errno::ENOENT)

But I stopped at this point because it's taking way too much time. I feel like I should nuke this GitLab install and start over. What gives? I have an omnibus instance running in Ubuntu at work and it was super easy.

I have an old-ish laptop I want to turn into a sort of home server. As this is for personal use at home, I'd like to use Arch. Probably an odd choice for a server but I like the Arch side of things.

One of the things I'd really like to run on it is a GitLab server. GitLab doesn't have an official means to install it on Arch, but there is a community package on the repo for it. From the page on the Arch wiki, it looks much more difficult to set up and configure (compared to an officially-supported distro). From the looks of it, it seems to be the from-source version of GitLab, which from reading through the docs, makes a lot of setup and maintenance much more difficult even after installation.

To anyone who runs GitLab on Arch: How much more difficult is GitLab on Arch compared to an Omnibus-based installation? How much more difficult is configuration and maintenance? What kinds of problems am I going to run into that I wouldn't on a GitLab-friendly distro? How much of the GitLab docs would be useless or inapplicable to me? Just how doable is this?