Cannot do reconfigure and admin commands as anything other than root.

We are having a problem installing this with our sysadmins. We have a corp policy that nobody gets root access to any machine outside of the sysadmin group. so, we were able to get the 5 components of Gitlab to run under our assigned user account. That was relatively painless. the problem now is that we can't run the admin tools as that or any other user. Meaning, for my department to administer the server, we have to edit the /etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb file and reconfigure. Well, to do that, we have to change the permissions of the /etc/gitlab folder to chown -R root:mygroup /etc/gitlab and chmod -R 770 /etc/gitlab, which works great until we run gitlab-ctl reconfigure The chef components of reconfigure reset the permissions to chown -R root:root /etc/gitlab and chmod -R 755 /etc/gitlab. And if you try to run reconfigure as anything other than root, it fails saying it doesn't have permission to run that chown.

This is huge for us. This means that the team that is responsible for administering the server can't actually administer the server. Sysadmins do OS, Departments do software. Lack of this means if i want to change something in the gitlab.rb in production, instead of being able to just go and do it, i have to file a service ticket with the sysadmins. Those service tickets take anywhere from 2 days to 3 weeks depending on priority to update the gitlab.rb file. Now, reconfigure is even more difficult because it involves restarting the services. Well the sysadmins only do restart changes on infrastructure deploy weekends, which occur once a month. AND since this will eventually be hosting the puppet scripts used on those infrastructure weekends, we will be designated 24/7 which means we only get odd month infrastructure weekends. So if i want to change the title bar of the website, instead of me doing it in a few seconds, i would have to wait, conceivably 2 months for the sysadmins to do it.

can this thing be changed so the admin tools can be run by someone other than root?