How to install Gerrit on Linux / Ubuntu

Gerrit is a free, web-based team code collaboration tool. Software developers in a team can review each other’s modifications on their source code using a Web browser and approve or reject those changes. It integrates closely with Git, a distributed version control system. Wikipedia

In this post we will show, how to install Gerrit Linux distros specifically Ubuntu.

$ wget -c https://gerrit-releases.storage.googleapis.com/gerrit-3.1.3.war

Now we need to export path / directory where gerrit site will be created using GERRIT_SITE variable.

$ export GERRIT_SITE=~/gerrit_site

$ java -jar gerrit*.war init --batch --dev -d $GERRIT_SITE

[2020-04-07 16:11:40,939] [main] INFO  com.google.gerrit.server.config.GerritServerConfigProvider : No /home/devlab/gerrit_site/etc/gerrit.config; assuming defaults
Generating SSH host key ... rsa... ed25519... ecdsa 256... ecdsa 384... ecdsa 521... done
Initialized /home/devlab/gerrit_site
Reindexing projects:    100% (2/2)
Reindexed 2 documents in projects index in 0.1s (18.2/s)
Executing /home/devlab/gerrit_site/bin/gerrit.sh start
Starting Gerrit Code Review: WARNING: Could not adjust Gerrit's process for the kernel's out-of-memory killer.
         This may be caused by /home/devlab/gerrit_site/bin/gerrit.sh not being run as root.
         Consider changing the OOM score adjustment manually for Gerrit's PID=11529 with e.g.:
         echo '-1000' | sudo tee /proc/11529/oom_score_adj
OK

The above command will initialise the gerrit site at /home/your_user/gerrit_site directory. In our case its “/home/devlab/gerrit_site” directory and during initialisation it will use “/home/devlab/gerrit_site/etc/gerrit.config” as default configuration. You can check and modify this configuration file as your want or can use below command to change the variables as,

$ git config --file $GERRIT_SITE/etc/gerrit.config httpd.listenUrl 'http://localhost:8080'

In above command, you can choose to change the port to some other free port if port 8080 is being used by any other application..

Now lets start the gerrit server as,

$ $GERRIT_SITE/bin/gerrit.sh restart

Stopping Gerrit Code Review: OK
Starting Gerrit Code Review: WARNING: Could not adjust Gerrit's process for the kernel's out-of-memory killer.
         This may be caused by /home/devlab/gerrit_testsite/bin/gerrit.sh not being run as root.
         Consider changing the OOM score adjustment manually for Gerrit's PID=11790 with e.g.:
         echo '-1000' | sudo tee /proc/11790/oom_score_adj
OK

as seen above, there seems to be some permission problems since we had started the server with standard user, which you can avoid by starting the server with sudo permissions as,

$ sudo $GERRIT_SITE/bin/gerrit.sh restart

sudo] password for devlab:
Stopping Gerrit Code Review: OK
Starting Gerrit Code Review: OK

You are now all set, and you can visit http://localhost:8080 to see the gerrit installed.

References

• https://gerrit.googlesource.com/gerrit/
• https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/linux-quickstart.html