I have actually done this recently, we were upgrading our instance of gitlab and needed to save and import repositories to the new installation.
First, create a bundle of the checked-out repository. For example, say you checked out a repository we will call myrepository
To check out the repository use git clone (let's assume your repository is under the root account and the ipaddress is 192.168.1.1)
git clone http://192.168.1.1/root/myrepository.git
(or match your environment)
Now this step is somewhat important; you need to change into the working directory that has the .git folder of your checked out repository.
cd myrepository
Next, you create a bundle file:
git bundle create myrepository.bundle --all
Import the bundle file into the new instance of gitlab.
Create a new 'myrepository' on the gitlab gui interface
clone the empty repository; let's say this new gitlab has the ipaddress 192.168.1.2:
git clone http:\\192.168.1.2\root\myrepository.git
(or match your environment)
You will get warnings that you cloned an empty repository. This is normal.
Change into the working directory of your checked out repository and do a git pull:
cd myrepository
git pull file/path/to/myrepository.bundle
this will pull the repository into your clone. Next you can do a git add, git commit and git push
This should work assuming you have the gitlab server settings set up correctly; you may have issues such as needing to add a client_max_body_size parameter in your nginx.conf file and also a 'git config --global http.postBuffer' to push large files.
Another way to do this is to make patch files of each commit and then deploy them:
This involves doing a 'git format-patch -C 0badil..68elid -o patch_directory_path' and reference the range of all your commits and have them pushed to an output directory; this should give you one patch file per commit. Next would involve git cloning the new empty repository, changing into the working directory of the clone and applying the patches to the new repository using 'git am patch_directory_path'