# Stash Latest (2.9) : Using Stash in the enterprise

Added by pwatson , edited by pwatson on Sep 10, 2013

Atlassian Stash is the Git code management solution for enterprise teams. It allows everyone in your organisation to easily collaborate on your Git repositories, while providing enterprise-grade support for:

- user authentication
- repository security
- integration with your existing databases and development environment.

This page describes best practice for using Stash in enterprise environments, that is with 500+ user licenses. Of course, much of this information is also applicable to other Stash installations.

On this page:

## Platform requirements for hosting Stash

Although Stash can be run on Windows, Linux and Mac systems, for enterprise use we only recommend, and support, Linux. This recommendation is based on our own testing and experience with using Stash.

Please see the Supported platforms page for details of the supported versions of Java, external databases, web browsers and Git.

## Performance considerations with Stash

In general, Stash is very stable and has low memory consumption. There are no scalability limits other than for Git hosting operations (clone in particular). We know this is the scalability limit of the product; the limit is proportional to the number of cores on the system.

As an example, data collected from an internal Stash instance indicate that for a team of approximately 50, with associated continuous integration infrastructure, we see a peak concurrency of 30 simultaneous clone operations and a mean of 2 simultaneous clone operations. We conservatively expect that a customer with similar usage patterns would be capable of supporting 1000 users on a machine with 40 cores and a supporting amount of ram. While we expect a peak concurrency larger than 40, Stash is designed to queue incoming requests so as to avoid overwhelming the server.

Please see Scaling Stash for more information about Stash performance and hardware requirements.

## Setting up Stash in a production environment

When setting up Stash for a production or enterprise environment, please follow the instructions on the Installing Stash on Linux and Mac page. We highly recommend that you configure the following aspects:

##### Use an external database

- For production environments Stash should use an external database, rather than the embedded database. Set up your external DBMS (for example MySQL) before starting Stash for the first time. This allows you to connect Stash to that DBMS using the Setup Wizard that launches when you first run Stash. See Connecting Stash to an external database.

##### Connect to your existing user directory

- Connect Stash to your existing user directory (for example Active Directory). See External user directories.

##### Secure the Stash home directory

- For production environments the Stash home directory should be secured against unauthorised access. See Stash home directory.

##### Secure Stash with HTTPS

- Access to Stash should be secured using HTTP over SSL, especially if your data is sensitive and Stash is exposed to the internet. See Securing Stash with HTTPS.

##### Enable SSH access to Git repositories

- Enable SSH access for your Stash users to Git repositories in Stash so that they can add their own SSH keys to Stash, and then use those SSH keys to secure Git operations between their computer and the Stash server. See Enabling SSH access to Git repositories in Stash.

##### Change the context path for Stash

- If you are running Stash behind a proxy, or you have another Atlassian application (or any Java web application), available at the same hostname and context path as Stash, then you should set a unique context path for Stash. See Moving Stash to a different context path.

## Administering Stash in a production environment

##### Upgrading Stash

- For production environments we recommend that you test the Stash upgrade on a QA server before deploying to production. See the Stash upgrade guide.

##### Backups and recovery

- Stash does not currently have any built-in data backup or recovery solutions. We highly recommend that you establish a data recovery plan that is aligned with your company's policies. See Data recovery and backups for information about using the Stash backup client.

##### Logging

- Stash server logs can be found in ``<STASH_HOME>`/log`. Logs for the bundled Tomcat webserver can be found in ``<Stash installation directory>`/log`. See Stash debug logging.
- Stash displays recent audit events for each repository and project (only visible to Stash admins and system admins), and also creates full audit log files that can be found in the `<Stash home directory``>/audit/logs` directory. Note that Stash has an upper limit to the number of log files it maintains, and deletes the oldest file when a new file is created – we recommend an automated backup of log files. See Audit logging in Stash.