Juju Charms Collection
gitlab package

gitlab does not auto-generate password

Bug #1416684 reported by Blaisorblade
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This bug affects 1 person
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gitlab (Juju Charms Collection)
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Bug Description

I'm trying to use this charm from juju quickstart's GUI, and it's been much harder than the rest. Yes, I have little clue on juju and just playing around — but juju's promise is that this will still work.

gitlab *silently* refuses to start if you don't set the admin password. Yes, the docs say that you should set the admin password before starting it, but that's not needed by any other charm I've used — both mysql and nagios will generate a root password and let you recover it by ssh-ing into the machine. Moreover, I could only see the actual error message by looking at some of the juju logs inside the machine — the web interface just said that some hook failed.

Revision history for this message
Blaisorblade (p-giarrusso) wrote :

In fact, the README does say "edit config.yaml", but it does not say "you must set the admin password or things will break horribly". (And I know there must be a root password before I do a real deployment, but I'm not there yet, so it should really be documented).

Revision history for this message
José Antonio Rey (jose) wrote :

Probably an error on the README file instead of the charm itself. I believe that this is a security measure, and I've done this in several of my charms - the service refuses to configure unless you set a password.

I'd be for changing this to an error on the README file, since creating a default password involves a security risk.

Revision history for this message
Blaisorblade (p-giarrusso) wrote :

Thanks for the prompt answer!

But to clarify: I'm not proposing a (fixed) default password, I'm proposing to have a randomly-generated password. If there's a specific security risk with that, I'm happy to retract the request (but then somebody should fix the MySQL and Nagios charms). But I believe there isn't, and not just because I somewhat trust those recommended charms — the only difference with "generate a fresh password by hand/with a program like KeePassX" is that the password is also stored inside a file which is accessible to the admin, but if you can access this file that's because you're already root.

Moreover, even if this were properly documented, it should still be possible to get a specific, discoverable error and set the password in a second moment (but that's the focus of https://bugs.launchpad.net/charms/+source/gitlab/+bug/1416687). Right now, if you try starting this charm before you set the password, you're stuck.

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