Problem
So, I ended up locking myself out of my server (don't ask...) and needed to shut it down while I booted into a live linux distro to mount my server drive and undo my sillyness. Anyway when I rebooted, GitLab wouldn't start (was stuck on the "Deploying" page).
Running
sudo gitlab-ctl restart
produced the following scariness:
jay@home-server:~$ sudo gitlab-ctl restart fail: gitaly: runsv not running fail: gitlab-monitor: runsv not running fail: gitlab-workhorse: runsv not running fail: logrotate: runsv not running fail: node-exporter: runsv not running fail: postgres-exporter: runsv not running fail: postgresql: runsv not running fail: prometheus: runsv not running fail: redis: runsv not running fail: redis-exporter: runsv not running fail: sidekiq: runsv not running fail: unicorn: runsv not running
Solution
gitlab-runsvdir isn't running (which is actually what the fail messages are complaining about). You'll likely need to start the service manually:
sudo systemctl start gitlab-runsvdir
If the above command freezes (as in doesn't exit to the command line) - then most likely gitlab-runsvdir service got stuck (it's a technical term 
). In this case, kill the runsvdir process and rerun the above command, e.g.:
sudo killall runsvdir sudo systemctl start gitlab-runsvdir
Then try the below again and things should start up:
sudo gitlab-ctl restart
Ensure gitlab-runsvdir service is enabled
gitlab-runsvdir should start on boot. Let's make sure that it's enabled (which should start it on boot):
sudo systemctl enable gitlab-runsvdir
References
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