How to configure GitLab to use external git repository on a remote server

Question

We have been developing several projects on git (with a remote git repository on ServerA, for example). Now we have installed GitLab on ServerB and want to configure it to use the git on ServerA (because ServerA is carefully maintained, backed up, and ...). Is there anyway to do the job? Another problem is that access to each repository on ServerA is set for users (at no, read, or write access). How can those accesses by applied to ServerB?

Answer 1

In theory, if the repositories can be access through a network path from ServerB to ServerA, all you need to do is to report that path in the GitLab config.yml

# REPOS_PATH MUST NOT BE A SYMLINK!!!
repos_path: /home/git/repositories/

In that case, the GitLab process should have full read/write access to those repos, as the users won't have a direct access to them anymore.