This plugin allows making Gerrit highly available by having redundant Gerrit masters.

The masters must be:

• connecting to the same database
• sharing the git repositories using a shared file system (e.g. NFS)
• behind a load balancer (e.g. HAProxy)

Currently, the only mode supported is one primary (active) master and one backup (passive) master but eventually the plan is to support n active masters. In the active/passive mode, the active master is handling all traffic while the passive is kept updated to be always ready to take over.

Even if database and git repositories are shared by the masters, there are a few areas of concern in order to be able to switch traffic between masters in a transparent manner from the user's perspective. The 4 areas of concern are things that Gerrit stores either in memory or locally in the review site:

• caches
• secondary indexes
• stream-events
• web sessions

They need either to be shared or kept local to each master but synchronized. This plugin needs to be installed in both masters and will take care of sharing or synchronizing them.

Caches

Every time a cache eviction occurs in one of the masters, the eviction will be forwarded the other master so its caches do not contain stale entries.

Secondary indexes

Every time the secondary index is modified in one of the masters, e.g., a change is added, updated or removed from the index, the other master's index is updated accordingly. This way, both indexes are kept synchronized.

Stream events

Every time a stream event occurs in one of the masters (see [more events info] (https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/cmd-stream-events.html#events)), the event is forwarded to the other master which re-plays it. This way, the output of the stream-events command is the same, no matter which master a client is connected to.

Web session

The built-in Gerrit H2 based web session cache is replaced with a file based implementation that is shared amongst both masters.

Setup

Prerequisites:

• Unique database server must be accessible from both masters
• Git repositories must be located on a shared file system
• A directory on a shared file system must be available for @PLUGIN@ to use

For both masters:

• Configure database section in gerrit.config to use the shared database
• Configure gerrit.basePath in gerrit.config to the shared repositories location
• Install and configure @PLUGIN@ plugin

Here is an example of the minimal @PLUGIN@.config:

Primary master

[main]
  sharedDirectory = /directory/accessible/from/both/masters

[peerInfo "static"]
  url = http://backupMasterHost:8081/

[http]
  user = username
  password = password

Backup master

[main]
  sharedDirectory = /directory/accessible/from/both/masters

[peerInfo "static"]
  url = http://primaryMasterHost:8080/

[http]
  user = username
  password = password

For further information and supported options, refer to config documentation.