Disabling Geo (PREMIUM SELF)

If you want to revert to a regular Omnibus setup after a test, or you have encountered a Disaster Recovery situation and you want to disable Geo momentarily, you can use these instructions to disable your Geo setup.

There should be no functional difference between disabling Geo and having an active Geo setup with no secondary Geo sites if you remove them correctly.

To disable Geo, follow these steps:

1. Remove all secondary Geo sites.
2. Remove the primary site from the UI.
3. Remove secondary replication slots.
4. Remove Geo-related configuration.
5. Optional. Revert PostgreSQL settings to use a password and listen on an IP.

Remove all secondary Geo sites

To disable Geo, you need to first remove all your secondary Geo sites, which means replication will not happen anymore on these sites. You can follow our docs to remove your secondary Geo sites.

If the current site that you want to keep using is a secondary site, you need to first promote it to primary. You can use our steps on how to promote a secondary site to do that.

Remove the primary site from the UI

To remove the primary site:

1. Remove all secondary Geo sites
2. On the top bar, select Menu > Admin.
3. On the left sidebar, select Geo > Nodes.
4. Select Remove for the primary node.
5. Confirm by selecting Remove when the prompt appears.

Remove secondary replication slots

To remove secondary replication slots, run one of the following queries on your primary Geo node in a PostgreSQL console (sudo gitlab-psql):

• If you already have a PostgreSQL cluster, drop individual replication slots by name to prevent removing your secondary databases from the same cluster. You can use the following to get all names and then drop each individual slot:

  SELECT slot_name, slot_type, active FROM pg_replication_slots; -- view present replication slots
  SELECT pg_drop_replication_slot('slot_name'); -- where slot_name is the one expected from above

• To remove all secondary replication slots:

  SELECT pg_drop_replication_slot(slot_name) FROM pg_replication_slots;

Remove Geo-related configuration

1. For each node on your primary Geo site, SSH into the node and log in as root:

   sudo -i

2. Edit /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb and remove the Geo related configuration by removing any lines that enabled geo_primary_role:

   ## In pre-11.5 documentation, the role was enabled as follows. Remove this line.
   geo_primary_role['enable'] = true
   
   ## In 11.5+ documentation, the role was enabled as follows. Remove this line.
   roles ['geo_primary_role']

3. After making these changes, reconfigure GitLab for the changes to take effect.

(Optional) Revert PostgreSQL settings to use a password and listen on an IP

If you want to remove the PostgreSQL-specific settings and revert to the defaults (using a socket instead), you can safely remove the following lines from the /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb file:

postgresql['sql_user_password'] = '...'
gitlab_rails['db_password'] = '...'
postgresql['listen_address'] = '...'
postgresql['md5_auth_cidr_addresses'] =  ['...', '...']