After spending lots of time trying to make Gerrit work we agree with a conclusion that “Gerrit is ugly, intimidating, and inhumane“ and buggy. At least for us and Ubuntu 12.04.1.
According to Gerrit documentation:
The first user to sign-in and register an account will be automatically placed into the fully privileged Administrators group, permitting server management over the web and over SSH.
But here is our 5 attempts to make it work:
- installing Gerrit 2.5 with H2 (aka Quick Installation in 10 Minutes) with stock Ubuntu Apache as reverse proxy, installation successful, logging in with Google Account OpenID, no administrator rights
- installing Gerrit 2.5 with MySQL with stock Ubuntu Apache as reverse proxy, installation successful, logging in with Google Account OpenID, no administrator rights
- installing Gerrit 2.4.2 (maybe it’s a problem with 2.5 only?) with H2 with stock Ubuntu Apache as reverse proxy, installation successful, logging in with Google Account OpenID, no administrator rights
- installing Gerrit 2.4.2 with MySQL with stock Ubuntu Apache as reverse proxy, installation successful, logging in with Google Account OpenID, no administrator rights
- installing Gerrit 2.5 with MySQL (no Apache and reverse proxy this time), installation successful, logging in with Google Account OpenID, no administrator rights
Thus whatever path we chose, Gerrit failed to properly grant administrator rights to the first user as it clearly indicated in the docs.
There is a solution of course which is to edit database directly. However it makes one wonder what other nice “features” Gerrit is hiding.
And off we go to Phabricator.