Gerrit

Gerrit technical documents

We use Gerrit for our code review system for Git.

Experimental:

Gerrit test instance
Gerrit test install, hosted in devtools Cloud VPS project

Overview

Gerrit is installed on gerrit1001 in the prefix /var/lib/gerrit2 and serves public request at https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/) . A replica runs on gerrit2001 which serves requests at https://gerrit-replica.wikimedia.org/r/ ), it is intended for a switch over and for various bots in order to offload the primary instance.

Gerrit is a Java daemon which listens for HTTP connections (TCP port 8080) and SSH connections (TCP port 29418). Apache proxies the relevant URLs on port 80 and 443 through to Gerrit. The SSH port provides a restricted shell for Git upload pack, reviews and administrative commands.

Since the Gerrit v3.2 upgrade in summer 2020, Gerrit no longer uses a conventional, relational database. So if you read somewhere about Gerrit's MySQL (or similar) database or "reviewdb", it is stale information. Instead of a relational database, Gerrit now stores the needed data directly in the git repositories (NoteDB). To speed up lookup, it creates indices also known has secondary index. These indices are Lucene backed indices and H2 (flat file database engine from the Java world).

Git repositories are stored at /srv/gerrit/git/.

Gerrit uses the LDAP instance shared with Wikimedia Cloud Services for authentication. Accounts under ou=people,dc=wikimedia,dc=org and groups under ou=groups,dc=wikimedia,dc=org are exposed to Gerrit. The Gerrit account name is the cn field in LDAP. In order to log in to Gerrit, a user needs to already have a Wikimedia developer account. See Help:Getting Started for the process of getting a developer account.

To find out what version of Gerrit is running, you can use either of the following two commands:

java -jar /var/lib/gerrit2/review_site/bin/gerrit.war version
ssh -p 29418 gerrit.wikimedia.org gerrit version

As of November 2020, Gerrit runs with Java 8 (upgrade to Java 11 is task T268225).

End users documentations

See:

Gerrit online documentation
Our own documentations:

Alternatively, you can follow the Git & Gerrit codelab.

Upgrade procedures

See /Upgrade.

Administration

See /Administration

Operations

See /Operations

How to setup Gerrit in a Cloud VPS project

See Gerrit/Running in Cloud VPS.

Troubleshooting / upgrade FAQ

Frequently asked questions regarding issues since the recent Gerrit version upgrade to 3.2.

Plugin install error: TypeError: self.onAction is not a function

If you see this error please hard refresh your browser cache.

For some the Ctrl + F5 or Stift + Ctrl + F5 (or whatever combination your browser wants) is not sufficient.

If you still run into the issue after pressing your browsers F5 combination, please try clearing your caches for good.

For example on Firefox follow steps 1-6 from

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-clear-firefox-cache#w_clear-the-cache

If you use a different browser, it should allow you to clear cached web content somewhere in the setting too. Please find that in your browser's help pages and follow the instructions.

Can't upload any patches with git review

If you use git-review to submit patches to gerrit, make sure you have 1.27 or newer (not 1.26). git-review 1.26 does not work with the new gerrit version.