Installing GitHub Enterprise Server on AWS

Prerequisites

• You must have a GitHub Enterprise license file. For more information, see "Setting up a trial of GitHub Enterprise Server" and "About licenses for GitHub Enterprise."
• You must have an AWS account capable of launching EC2 instances and creating EBS volumes. For more information, see the Amazon Web Services website.
• Most actions needed to launch your GitHub Enterprise Server instance may also be performed using the AWS management console. However, we recommend installing the AWS command line interface (CLI) for initial setup. Examples using the AWS CLI are included below. For more information, see Amazon's guides "Working with the AWS Management Console" and "What is the AWS Command Line Interface."

This guide assumes you are familiar with the following AWS concepts:

• Launching EC2 Instances
• Managing EBS Volumes
• Using Security Groups (For managing network access to your instance)
• Elastic IP Addresses (EIP) (Strongly recommended for production environments)
• EC2 and Virtual Private Cloud (If you plan to launch into a Virtual Private Cloud)
• AWS Pricing (For calculating and managing costs)

For an architectural overview, see the "AWS Architecture Diagram for Deploying GitHub Enterprise Server".

This guide recommends the principle of least privilege when setting up your GitHub Enterprise Server instance on AWS. For more information, refer to the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) documentation.

Hardware considerations

• Minimum requirements
• Beta features in GitHub Enterprise Server 2.22
• Storage
• CPU and memory

Minimum requirements

We recommend different hardware configurations depending on the number of user licenses for your GitHub Enterprise Server instance. If you provision more resources than the minimum requirements, your instance will perform and scale better.

User licenses	vCPUs	Memory	Attached storage	Root storage
Trial, demo, or 10 light users	2 or 4	16 GB or 32 GB	100 GB or 150 GB	200 GB
10 to 3,000	4 or 8	32 GB or 48 GB	250 GB or 300 GB	200 GB
3,000 to 5000	8 or 12	64 GB	500 GB	200 GB
5,000 to 8000	12 or 16	96 GB	750 GB	200 GB
8,000 to 10,000+	16 or 20	128 GB or 160 GB	1000 GB	200 GB

For more information about adjusting resources for an existing instance, see "Increasing storage capacity" and "Increasing CPU or memory resources."

Beta features in GitHub Enterprise Server 2.22

GitHub Enterprise Server 2.22 offered features in beta, such as GitHub Actions, GitHub Packages, and code scanning. For more information, see the GitHub Enterprise Server 2.22 release notes.

If you enabled beta features for GitHub Enterprise Server 2.22, your instance requires additional hardware resources. For more information about minimum requirements, see "Minimum requirements."

For more information about the hardware requirements for GitHub Actions, see "Getting started with GitHub Actions for GitHub Enterprise Server."

Storage

We recommend a high-performance SSD with high input/output operations per second (IOPS) and low latency for GitHub Enterprise Server. Workloads are I/O intensive. If you use a bare metal hypervisor, we recommend directly attaching the disk or using a disk from a storage area network (SAN).

Your instance requires a persistent data disk separate from the root disk. For more information, see "System overview."

To configure the beta of GitHub Actions, you must provide external blob storage. For more information, see "Getting started with GitHub Actions for GitHub Enterprise Server."

The available space on the root filesystem will be 50% of the total disk size. You can resize your instance's root disk by building a new instance or using an existing instance. For more information, see "System overview" and "Increasing storage capacity."

CPU and memory

The CPU and memory resources that GitHub Enterprise Server requires depend on the levels of activity for users, automations, and integrations.

If you enabled the beta of GitHub Actions for the users of your GitHub Enterprise Server instance, you may need to provision additional CPU and memory resources for your instance. For more information, see "Getting started with GitHub Actions for GitHub Enterprise Server."

When you increase CPU resources, we recommend adding at least 6.5 GB of memory for each vCPU (up to 16 vCPUs) that you provision for the instance. When you use more than 16 vCPUs, you don't need to add 6.5 GB of memory for each vCPU, but you should monitor your instance to ensure it has enough memory.

For more information about monitoring the capacity and performance of GitHub Enterprise Server, see "Monitoring your appliance."

You can increase your instance's CPU or memory resources. For more information, see "Increasing CPU or memory resources."

Determining the instance type

Before launching your GitHub Enterprise Server instance on AWS, you'll need to determine the machine type that best fits the needs of your organization. To review the minimum requirements for GitHub Enterprise Server, see "Minimum requirements."

GitHub recommends a memory-optimized instance for GitHub Enterprise Server. For more information, see Amazon EC2 Instance Types on the Amazon EC2 website.

Selecting the GitHub Enterprise Server AMI

You can select an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for GitHub Enterprise Server using the GitHub Enterprise Server portal or the AWS CLI.

AMIs for GitHub Enterprise Server are available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East and US-West) region. This allows US customers with specific regulatory requirements to run GitHub Enterprise Server in a federally compliant cloud environment. For more information on AWS's compliance with federal and other standards, see AWS's GovCloud (US) page and AWS's compliance page.

Using the GitHub Enterprise Server portal to select an AMI

1. Navigate to the GitHub Enterprise Server download page.
2. Click Get the latest release of GitHub Enterprise Server.
3. In the Select your platform drop-down menu, click Amazon Web Services.
4. In the Select your AWS region drop-down menu, choose your desired region.
5. Take note of the AMI ID that is displayed.

Using the AWS CLI to select an AMI

1. Using the AWS CLI, get a list of GitHub Enterprise Server images published by GitHub's AWS owner IDs (025577942450 for GovCloud, and 895557238572 for other regions). For more information, see "describe-images" in the AWS documentation.

   aws ec2 describe-images \
   --owners OWNER ID \
   --query 'sort_by(Images,&Name)[*].{Name:Name,ImageID:ImageId}' \
   --output=text

2. Take note of the AMI ID for the latest GitHub Enterprise Server image.

Creating a security group

If you're setting up your AMI for the first time, you will need to create a security group and add a new security group rule for each port in the table below. For more information, see the AWS guide "Using Security Groups."

1. Using the AWS CLI, create a new security group. For more information, see "create-security-group" in the AWS documentation.

   $ aws ec2 create-security-group --group-name SECURITY_GROUP_NAME --description "SECURITY GROUP DESCRIPTION"

2. Take note of the security group ID (sg-xxxxxxxx) of your newly created security group.

3. Create a security group rule for each of the ports in the table below. For more information, see "authorize-security-group-ingress" in the AWS documentation.

   $ aws ec2 authorize-security-group-ingress --group-id SECURITY_GROUP_ID --protocol PROTOCOL --port PORT_NUMBER --cidr SOURCE IP RANGE

   This table identifies what each port is used for.

   Port	Service	Description
   22	SSH	Git over SSH access. Clone, fetch, and push operations to public/private repositories supported.
   25	SMTP	SMTP with encryption (STARTTLS) support.
   80	HTTP	Web application access. All requests are redirected to the HTTPS port when SSL is enabled.
   122	SSH	Instance shell access. The default SSH port (22) is dedicated to application git+ssh network traffic.
   161/UDP	SNMP	Required for network monitoring protocol operation.
   443	HTTPS	Web application and Git over HTTPS access.
   1194/UDP	VPN	Secure replication network tunnel in high availability configuration.
   8080	HTTP	Plain-text web based Management Console. Not required unless SSL is disabled manually.
   8443	HTTPS	Secure web based Management Console. Required for basic installation and configuration.
   9418	Git	Simple Git protocol port. Clone and fetch operations to public repositories only. Unencrypted network communication. If you have enabled private mode on your instance, then opening this port is only required if you also enabled anonymous Git read access. For more information, see "Enforcing repository management policies in your enterprise."

Creating the GitHub Enterprise Server instance

To create the instance, you'll need to launch an EC2 instance with your GitHub Enterprise Server AMI and attach an additional storage volume for your instance data. For more information, see "Hardware considerations."

Launching an EC2 instance

In the AWS CLI, launch an EC2 instance using your AMI and the security group you created. Attach a new block device to use as a storage volume for your instance data, and configure the size based on your user license count. For more information, see "run-instances" in the AWS documentation.

aws ec2 run-instances \
  --security-group-ids SECURITY_GROUP_ID \
  --instance-type INSTANCE_TYPE \
  --image-id AMI_ID \
  --block-device-mappings '[{"DeviceName":"/dev/xvdf","Ebs":{"VolumeSize":SIZE,"VolumeType":"TYPE"}}]' \
  --region REGION \
  --ebs-optimized

Allocating an Elastic IP and associating it with the instance

If this is a production instance, we strongly recommend allocating an Elastic IP (EIP) and associating it with the instance before proceeding to GitHub Enterprise Server configuration. Otherwise, the public IP address of the instance will not be retained after instance restarts. For more information, see "Allocating an Elastic IP Address" and "Associating an Elastic IP Address with a Running Instance" in the Amazon documentation.

Both primary and replica instances should be assigned separate EIPs in production High Availability configurations. For more information, see "Configuring GitHub Enterprise Server for High Availability."

Configuring the GitHub Enterprise Server instance

1. Copy the virtual machine's public DNS name, and paste it into a web browser.
2. At the prompt, upload your license file and set a management console password. For more information, see "Managing your license for GitHub Enterprise."
3. In the Management Console, configure and save your desired settings. For more information, see "Configuring the GitHub Enterprise Server appliance."
4. The instance will restart automatically.
5. Click Visit your instance.

Further reading

• "System overview"