Downgrading from EE to CE

If you ever decide to downgrade your Enterprise Edition back to the Community Edition, there are a few steps you need take before installing the CE package on top of the current EE package, or, if you are in an installation from source, before you change remotes and fetch the latest CE code.

Disable Enterprise-only features

First thing to do is to disable the following features.

Authentication mechanisms

Kerberos and Atlassian Crowd are only available on the Enterprise Edition, so you should disable these mechanisms before downgrading and you should provide alternative authentication methods to your users.

Remove Service Integration entries from the database

The JenkinsService and GithubService classes are only available in the Enterprise Edition codebase, so if you downgrade to the Community Edition, you'll come across the following error:

Completed 500 Internal Server Error in 497ms (ActiveRecord: 32.2ms)

ActionView::Template::Error (The single-table inheritance mechanism failed to locate the subclass: 'JenkinsService'. This
error is raised because the column 'type' is reserved for storing the class in case of inheritance. Please rename this
column if you didn't intend it to be used for storing the inheritance class or overwrite Service.inheritance_column to
use another column for that information.)

or

Completed 500 Internal Server Error in 497ms (ActiveRecord: 32.2ms)

ActionView::Template::Error (The single-table inheritance mechanism failed to locate the subclass: 'GithubService'. This
error is raised because the column 'type' is reserved for storing the class in case of inheritance. Please rename this
column if you didn't intend it to be used for storing the inheritance class or overwrite Service.inheritance_column to
use another column for that information.)

All services are created automatically for every project you have, so in order to avoid getting this error, you need to remove all instances of the JenkinsService and GithubService from your database:

Omnibus Installation

sudo gitlab-rails runner "Service.where(type: ['JenkinsService', 'GithubService']).delete_all"

Source Installation

bundle exec rails runner "Service.where(type: ['JenkinsService', 'GithubService']).delete_all" production

NOTE: Note: If you are running GitLab =< v13.0 you need to also remove JenkinsDeprecatedService records.

Variables environment scopes

If you're using this feature and there are variables sharing the same key, but they have different scopes in a project, then you might want to revisit the environment scope setting for those variables.

In CE, environment scopes are completely ignored, therefore you could accidentally get a variable which you're not expecting for a particular environment. Make sure that you have the right variables in this case.

Data is completely preserved, so you could always upgrade back to EE and restore the behavior if you leave it alone.

Downgrade to CE

After performing the above mentioned steps, you are now ready to downgrade your GitLab installation to the Community Edition.

Omnibus Installation

To downgrade an Omnibus installation, it is sufficient to install the Community Edition package on top of the currently installed one. You can do this manually, by directly downloading the package you need, or by adding our CE package repository and following the CE installation instructions.

Source Installation

To downgrade a source installation, you need to replace the current remote of your GitLab installation with the Community Edition's remote, fetch the latest changes, and checkout the latest stable branch:

git remote set-url origin [email protected]:gitlab-org/gitlab-foss.git
git fetch --all
git checkout 8-x-stable

Remember to follow the correct update guides to make sure all dependencies are up to date.