gitlab-k8s VS local-path-provisioner

I had similar requirements recently and deployed gitlab with kustomize, only installed gitlab with ingress and nothing else you can find the github repo here if interested.

Download the release with manifests from github alternatively you can clone the repo, if you are cloning the repo remove the .git folder afterwards as it creates issues some times when rendering multiple version of the same file with subvars.

Deploy local-path-provisioner storage class but it does not support readwritemany so for high availability of your Kubernetes cluster better to use longhorn

I use this one. I'm waiting for the day it's combined with syncthing to sync across all nodes. https://github.com/rancher/local-path-provisioner

So I have this single node k3s cluster. k3s uses local-path (https://github.com/rancher/local-path-provisioner) as default SC that allows one to create dynamic volumes using nodes local storage.

Just create 1 single partition and format it with whatevery filesystem you like. And then use ranchers local-path-provisioner which will create a folder per PV (k3s has this integrated by default).

Tinkering locally with local path provisioner (https://github.com/rancher/local-path-provisioner), I find that I can delete and re-create the pod, and the data persists on disk. However, if I delete the PVC, when I recreate the PVC, a new directory on disk is created.

It is better to use https://github.com/rancher/local-path-provisioner (or similar) for this case which will do PVC on local directories because manually linking PV<>PVC will not work.

Since you only have one physical node anyway, I would just make the cluster a single-node cluster (1 VM) and use local storage on that VM. I’m biased though because this is what I do (I run K3s and use local path provisioner).

Rancher's Local Path Provisioner - From reading, seems to just use HostPath or Local PVs under the hood, but adds dynamic provisoning

With any of those tools, you'd implement a network storage on top of a network storage. I would go with mouting few volumes per node +local storage like (https://github.com/rancher/local-path-provisioner).