Freedesktop.org Successfully Migrates GitLab Instance to Hetzners IT Infrastructure

On March 22, 2025, Freedesktop.org successfully completed the migration of its GitLab instance to the IT infrastructure of the German hosting provider Hetzner. The project’s engineers accomplished this task within a week.

The GitLab instance managed by FreeDesktop.org supports not only the X.Org projects but also Mesa, Wayland, and numerous other open-source Linux projects. During the development of these projects, Freedesktop.org temporarily disabled the GitLab instance hosted on Equinix Metal, backed up the entire database and developments, then transferred everything to the Hetzner hosting. According to the project engineers, this procedure went smoothly and as planned, with the development of projects on the Freedesktop.org GitLab instance paused throughout the migration. As a result, projects like Mesa didn’t receive any new commits for a week, but their maintainers have already begun to catch up on lost time since the downtime.

“Due to an influx of spam, we had to impose restrictions on new accounts. Please visit this wiki page for instructions on how to obtain full permissions. We apologize for the inconvenience,” the project team clarified.

On March 16, 2025, Freedesktop.org initiated a week-long process to migrate its GitLab instance to a new IT infrastructure, aiming to restore services by March 22.

At the beginning of March, Benjamin Tissoires warned users about the unavailability of the Freedesktop.org GitLab instance for a week starting March 16 due to the migration to the new infrastructure.

Earlier, Tissoires explained the situation to clients and users of Freedesktop.org and outlined steps for the scheduled relocation of the platform, which hosts solutions based on free and open-source software aimed at compatibility and common technologies for open-source graphical and desktop systems, to a new IT infrastructure for its widely used GitLab instance.

At the end of January 2025, the administration of Freedesktop.org announced its search for a new home for its GitLab instance. The telecommunications company Equinix, which had hosted gitlab.freedesktop.org free of charge for nearly five years, requested that the instance be moved to another location (or that a payment plan be established) by the end of April 2025. The project’s administration managed to quickly plan a seamless migration from Equinix Metal by the deadline at the end of April, based on a hosting solution from Hetzner, using Fastly as the CDN. The team at Freedesktop.org intends to deploy a Kubernetes cluster based on Hetzner’s IT infrastructure.