On Premise Gitlab Pages: How to increase/debug public folder allowed size // ERROR: Uploading artifacts to coordinator... too large archive

Question

I'm creating a big (satis) package repository in a GitLab CI build step and wanted to just host it in GitLab Pages (on premise install). This works flawlessly, until the public folder size gets big, as soon as not only package versions, but downloads are stored in it as well. I added a last step to the pages task to show folder size:

$ du -h public
2.7G    public
Creating cache default...
public: found 564 matching files                   
vendor: found 3808 matching files                  
Created cache
Uploading artifacts...
public: found 564 matching files                   
ERROR: Uploading artifacts to coordinator... too large archive  id=494 responseStatus=413 Request Entity Too Large status=413 Request Entity Too Large token=kDf7gQEd
FATAL: Too large                                   
ERROR: Job failed: exit code 1

Of course that is a whole lot. I managed to delete some outdated minor version and was at

950MB public

Still the same problem. After some investigation there seem to be two relevant limits:

1. Gitlab Pages System Configuration: Max Pages Size (was set to 0 for unlimited)
2. NGINX max post size in /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb (was set to disabled, seems to default to 250M). Which I changed to nginx['client_max_body_size'] = '1024m'

Still the same problem. Even after deleting even more versions down to 580M folder size the same error resides. As soon as I disable downloads and thus only have <10Meverything works.

How can I debug the cause of this? Or is there some other hidden configuration?

Answer 1

Since GitLab 12.7 (Jan 2020) it is possible for GitLab administrators to set the maximum pages size for individual groups and projects directly in the project/group settings.

In the project under settings -> pages, you can set the "Maximum size of pages" in MB.

Administrators can also set the global limit under Admin -> Settings -> Preferences -> Pages.