Gitlab CI upload artifact fails: too large

Today I wanted to add a package-job to my Gitlab CI as instructed in this nice Gitlab tutorial.

I created the tar-file but when it came to uploading it failed with Request entity too large.

(...)
ERROR: Uploading artifacts to coordinator... too large archive  id=243 responseStatus=413 Request Entity Too Large status=413 Request Entity Too Large token=JYszbA9F
FATAL: Too large                                   
ERROR: Job failed: exit status 1

It took me some digging, but this is how I fixed this (note, the Nginx proxy was the one giving me a hard time).

Step 1: Set the maximum artifacts size

In your gitlab, go to Settings > Continuous Integration and Deployment > Maximum artifacts size (MB) and set it to the desired value. The default is 100MB.

Step 2: Set the nginx upload size

In the gitlab.rb file, mine at /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb, set or uncomment the following line.

nginx['client_max_body_size'] = '250m'

 

 

And reconfigure gitlab to get this to work.

gitlab-ctl reconfigure

Step 3: (optional) update your proxy(!)

I run gitlab on docker containers. On the server, I run nginx as a proxy to redirect requests for gitlab to these containers.

I failed to update the proxy configuration to allow the POST-ing of data to the containers.

As I use nginx, this is the line I added. For Apache, just google and you’ll find your answer.

client_max_body_size 0;

This will set no limits on clients sending data.

For reference, this is my whole nginx vhost file.

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name git.pauledenburg.com;
    client_max_body_size 0;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    }
}

Don’t forget to reload nginx.

$ sudo nginx -t
nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful

$ sudo service nginx reload