Gerrit multi-site plugin

This plugin allows to deploy a distributed cluster of multiple Gerrit masters each using a separate site without sharing any storage. The alignment between the masters happens using the replication plugin and an external message broker.

Requirements for the Gerrit masters are:

Gerrit v2.16.5 or later
Migrated to NoteDb
Connected to the same message broker
Accessible via a load balancer (e.g. HAProxy)

NOTE: The multi-site plugin will not start if Gerrit is not yet migrated to NoteDb.

Supports multiple read/write masters across multiple sites across different geographic locations. The Gerrit nodes are kept synchronized between each other using the replication plugin and a global ref-database in order to detect and prevent split-brains.

For more details on the overall multi-site design and roadmap, please refer to the multi-site plugin DESIGN.md document

License

This plugin is released under the same Apache 2.0 license and copyright holders as of the Gerrit Code Review project.

How to build

The multi-site plugin can only be built in tree mode, by cloning Gerrit and the multi-site plugin code, and checking them out on the desired branch.

Example of cloning Gerrit and multi-site for a stable-2.16 build:

git clone -b stable-2.16 https://gerrit.googlesource.com/gerrit
git clone -b stable-2.16 https://gerrit.googlesource.com/plugins/multi-site

cd gerrit/plugins
ln -s ../../multi-site .
rm external_plugin_deps.bzl
ln -s multi-site/external_plugin_deps.bzl .

Example of building the multi-site plugin:

cd gerrit
bazel build plugins/multi-site

The multi-site.jar plugin is generated to bazel-bin/plugins/multi-site/multi-site.jar.

Example of testing the multi-site plugin:

cd gerrit
bazel test plugins/multi-site:multi_site_tests

NOTE: The multi-site tests include also the use of Docker containers for instantiating and using a Kafka/Zookeeper broker. Make sure you have a Docker daemon running (/var/run/docker.sock accessible) or a DOCKER_HOST pointing to a Docker server.

Pre-requisites

Each Gerrit server of the cluster must be identified with a globally unique instance-id defined in $GERRIT_SITE/etc/gerrit.config. When migrating from a multi-site configuration with Gerrit v3.3 or earlier, you must reuse the instance-id value stored under $GERRIT_SITE/data/multi-site.

Example:

[gerrit]
  instanceId = 758fe5b7-1869-46e6-942a-3ae0ae7e3bd2

How to configure

Install the multi-site plugin into the $GERRIT_SITE/lib directory of all the Gerrit servers that are part of the multi-site cluster. Create a symbolic link from $GERRIT_SITE/lib/multi-site.jar into the $GERRIT_SITE/plugins.

Add the multi-site module to $GERRIT_SITE/etc/gerrit.config as follows:

[gerrit]
  installDbModule = com.googlesource.gerrit.plugins.multisite.GitModule
  installModule = com.googlesource.gerrit.plugins.multisite.Module

For more details on the configuration settings, please refer to the multi-site configuration documentation.

You also need to setup the Git-level replication between nodes. This can be done with either pull or push replication plugin.

HTTP endpoints

For information about available HTTP endpoints please refer to the documentation.