GitLab

GitLab is an open source, platform-independent and completely free web-based software repository and project management application implemented in Ruby on Rails and cloned from the famous GitHub project. It is used in more than 100,000 organizations worldwide and specifically engineered for the GNU/Linux platform.

Features at a glance

Being inspired by GitHub and hosted at GitHub, the GitLab project is a code hosting application that supports merge requests, comments, control repository access, network graph, code snippets, administration, Wiki and issues.

With GitLab, any application developer will be able to create projects and app repositories, do code reviews, and manage access. It helps multiple software developers to easily collaborate on code.

The application gives developers of any kind fine grained access controls to effortlessly manage Git repositories and keep their source code secure at all times. It also helps you to improve collaboration with merge requests, as well as to perform code reviews.

Another interesting feature of GitLab, is that it implements a Wiki and an issue tracker for each of your projects, making it one of the most popular solution to manage Git software repositories on-premises.

Requirements and installation

The GitLab software has been tailored specifically for the GNU/Linux platform, supporting all the major distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu. It requires Ruby 2.0 or higher, Git 1.7.10 or later, Redis 2.0 or higher, as well as the MySQL or PostgreSQL database servers.

The software is written in Ruby on Rails and distributed as a universal sources archive, allowing the user to optimize its source code for a specific operating system or hardware architecture (32-bit and 64-bit instruction set architectures are supported at this time). It is available under the MIT Expat license.

What is new in this release:

• Everything we do at GitLab, from our integrated product to our monthly releases, is centered on the goal of helping development teams reduce time to value. With each release, we want to help you do more in less time, while also providing an intuitive and user-friendly experience in our product. GitLab 9.5 takes a big step in furthering this goal. This release features improvements to our navigation, new project templates with pre-configured CI, and new automation features for CI and performance monitoring that will save you time and effort.
• This will be the last 9.x release, as we're preparing to release GitLab 10.0 on September 22nd! Nonetheless, we're shipping some great new features to round off our 9.x releases:
• To help improve your experience navigating GitLab, we've updated the new navigation, streamlining the UI and reducing the number of clicks it takes to move through your GitLab instance. With the newly added icons and subnav on hover, it's easier and faster than ever to explore GitLab.
• Getting started on a new project just got faster. In GitLab 9.5, we've introduced Project Templates, which allow you to quickly create a new project that has CI pre-configured.
• Continuing on our mission to save you time, we've made it possible for GitLab to automatically retry failed jobs ran with GitLab CI/CD. Now, you don't have to worry about losing time going back to your project's pipelines just to hit retry on a failed job.
• GitLab 9.5 also brings improvements to the latter part of the development lifecycle. With the addition of Automatic Monitoring for Auto Deployed applications we've made it easier for you to collect response and system metrics from your apps.

What is new in version 9.5.0:

• Everything we do at GitLab, from our integrated product to our monthly releases, is centered on the goal of helping development teams reduce time to value. With each release, we want to help you do more in less time, while also providing an intuitive and user-friendly experience in our product. GitLab 9.5 takes a big step in furthering this goal. This release features improvements to our navigation, new project templates with pre-configured CI, and new automation features for CI and performance monitoring that will save you time and effort.
• This will be the last 9.x release, as we're preparing to release GitLab 10.0 on September 22nd! Nonetheless, we're shipping some great new features to round off our 9.x releases:
• To help improve your experience navigating GitLab, we've updated the new navigation, streamlining the UI and reducing the number of clicks it takes to move through your GitLab instance. With the newly added icons and subnav on hover, it's easier and faster than ever to explore GitLab.
• Getting started on a new project just got faster. In GitLab 9.5, we've introduced Project Templates, which allow you to quickly create a new project that has CI pre-configured.
• Continuing on our mission to save you time, we've made it possible for GitLab to automatically retry failed jobs ran with GitLab CI/CD. Now, you don't have to worry about losing time going back to your project's pipelines just to hit retry on a failed job.
• GitLab 9.5 also brings improvements to the latter part of the development lifecycle. With the addition of Automatic Monitoring for Auto Deployed applications we've made it easier for you to collect response and system metrics from your apps.

What is new in version 9.4.0:

• Surprise is harder to achieve when you do everything in the open. But working in the open gives us the power to tell you why we're shipping what we're releasing today and how this release is setting up GitLab for something even better in the future.
• GitLab 9.4 lays the foundation of much that is to come, while still giving you some new powers today. You can now formally relate issues to each other, our out-of-the-box-magic monitoring now collects many more metrics without any configuration and we've quadrupled the things you can do with variables in CI.
• On top of this, we're giving you an actual glimpse into the future with a opt-in Beta of our new navigation. We hope that we can work with you to make it an improvement everyone loves.
• We are also thrilled to announce that we are shipping a GitLab PowerUp for Trello, making it easy for you to integrate your Trello boards with GitLab!
• Additionally, to empower our integrations set, we're keen to make your life easier with our new Slack App for GitLab.com!
• And if one glimpse doesn't suffice, we're aiming to fully automate the configuration of your DevOps toolchain with the vision of Auto DevOps, which will analyze your application and automatically configure your CI/CD pipeline to build, test, and deploy to Kubernetes. To see where we're heading, check out our vision for Auto DevOps!
• Related Issues EES EEP:
• Whenever you share a link from one issue to another, GitLab shortens it and crosslinks it automatically. But when issues get longer and projects more complex, it becomes hard to manage links and quickly find related issues. To solve this problem, we're introducing Related issues. With Related issues, you can formally declare another issue as related. A link to the other issue, its status and name will be shown in each issue. Simply paste a link to the issue you want to link or search for it by typing # (as you were able to do already) to link it. In the future, we will introduce different types of relationships through this mechanism.
• New Navigation CE EES EEP:
• To make it easier and faster to get around GitLab, we're working on updating our navigation. Because a new navigation can be a big disruption, we're releasing the first step as an opt-in configuration with GitLab 9.4. To enable the new navigation, click on your profile image in the top right corner and choose Turn on new navigation. We have made adjustments to the global top navigation and introduced contextual navigation in the left menu depending on what page you are currently viewing. The new UI is still a work in progress and will replace the existing navigation in the next few months, please see our blog post about our process and what work still needs to be done.
• Web Application Monitoring CE EES EEP:
• As part of GitLab 9.0 we launched system performance management integrated with CI/CD deployments, monitoring deployed applications on Kubernetes by tracking CPU and Memory utilization. This was a great first step, and with GitLab 9.4 we are excited to launch Web Application Monitoring with support beyond Kubernetes. GitLab will now automatically detect key user experience indicators like throughput, error rate, and latency. Simply connect Prometheus to a supported load balancer or HTTP server, and it will identify and begin tracking these statistics. Delivering a great experience is everyone's responsibility, and GitLab is making this easier by closing the performance feedback loop in the tool developers use every day.
• Group-level Secret Variables CE EES EEP:
• Secret variables are really useful when you need a safe place to store sensitive information. Until now, secret variables were stored at the project level. However, we know its common for different projects in the same group to share information on deployment or credentials for accessing external services. Group-level Secret Variables remove the need to duplicate variables from one project to the next: now you can enter these values once, and each project or subgroup in the group will access them automatically. It's also really simple to update these values. You just change them in one place and they'll be automatically modified for all of the projects.
• Variables in Pipeline Schedules CE EES EEP:
• In GitLab 9.2 we introduced Pipeline Schedules to automatically run pipelines at a specific interval of time, but most teams also want to specify different values for specific variables when running the schedule. In GitLab 9.4, we've added the ability to define variables when creating or modifying a pipeline schedule: these values will be added to all the other variables already defined. Using this feature, you can also redefine existing variables to have a different value only for that specific run, for example if you want to have a "daily" pipeline running some tests in a different way.
• Environment-specific Secret Variables EEP:
• Variables are often the right solution to define values that are then used during deployments to specific environments. Since different environments (e.g.: staging and production) may require different values for the same task, such as the app name, it is important to create a direct binding between some variables and the related environment. With GitLab 9.4, Environment-specific Variables are introduced to solve this issue, as developers can now define which environments will receive a variable, even using wildcards to include dynamic environments, like `review/*. It is now easy to deploy to different environments with a minimal effort!
• GitLab Power-Up for Trello CE EES EEP:
• Using both Trello and GitLab? Now you can make that experience even better with the new GitLab Power-Up! In Trello, when viewing one of your boards, simply go to Power-Ups and scroll to the GitLab Power-Up. After set-up, you will be able to attach merge requests to Trello cards. In Trello, you will need to configure your domain, such as gitlab.com/api/v4 for GitLab.com, and add your personal token.
• GitLab Slack App for GitLab.com CE EES EEP:
• GitLab already integrated deeply with Slack (and Mattermost, Microsoft Teams, and HipChat), but we didn't have an app in the Slack App Directory yet. Today we do! That means setting up Slack integration with your projects on GitLab.com is now much easier. You can set it up from your project settings in GitLab (Settings > Integrations). Soon it will be available from the Slack App directory as well. We're working together with Slack on making sure private instances will be able to use the same Slack App in the near future. Of course, private instances are able to integrate with Slack using the manual steps outlined in the documentation.
• Other Improvements in GitLab 9.4:
• Improved Internationalization CE EES EEP
• Unified Slack Interface CE EES EEP
• Group Milestones CE EES EEP
• Additional GitLab Service Metrics CE EES EEP
• Customizable Path for CI/CD Configuration CE EES EEP
• New Cache Policy for CI/CD Configuration CE EES EEP
• Extended Docker Configuration for CI/CD CE EES EEP
• Improved Prometheus Monitoring of Kubernetes Deployments CE EES EEP
• Upcoming Omnibus Package Signing CE EES EEP
• Security - Add LDAP SSL Certificate Verification CE EES EEP
• GitLab Runner 9.4 CE EES EEP
• GitLab Mattermost 4.0 CE EES EEP
• Omnibus Improvements CE EES EEP
• Performance Improvements CE EES EEP
• Experimental PostgreSQL High Availability EEP
• Mini-Graph for Multi-Project Pipelines EEP
• GitLab Geo Improvements EEP
• Object Storage for CI Artifacts EEP
• Deprecations:
• openSUSE 42.1:
• As the openSUSE community has ended support for version 42.1, GitLab has ended support as well as previously announced. Please upgrade to OpenSUSE 42.2 which is officially supported.
• GitLab CI API v1, GitLab Runner 1.11.x
• In 9.0 we released a new version of GitLab Runner that is based on the new API v4 instead of the old CI API v1. We are still supporting the old version of the API in GitLab, so users that are still using GitLab Runners 1.11.x can take their time for the migration process. With GitLab 9.6, planned to be shipped on September 22nd, we are going to remove the old CI API from GitLab, making GitLab Runner 1.11.x unable to communicate with the system. If you are using old GitLab Runner (

What is new in version 9.1.4:

• CE/EE: Fixed search terms highlight. (!11198)
• CE/EE: Fixed bug where merge request JSON would be displayed. (!11096)
• CE/EE: Handle incoming emails from aliases correctly. (!11079)
• CE/EE: Sort the network graph both by commit date and topographically. (!11057)
• CE/EE: Handle failures for incoming emails. (!11014/!1810)
• CE/EE: Fix error on CI/CD Settings page related to invalid pipeline trigger. (!10948)
• CE/EE: Fix cross referencing for private and internal projects. (!11243)
• CE/EE: Add missing project attributes to Import/Export. (!10880)
• EE: GitLab Geo: Backfill projects where the last attempt to backfill failed. (!1785)

What is new in version 9.0:

• Prevent users from creating notes on resources they can't access:
• An attacker was able to use the API to post comments on resources that they would not otherwise be able to view, which would "subscribe" them to the notifications for that resource and allow them to receive future updates about it, which may contain sensitive information. See #26249 and #26250 for more details.
• Prevent users from deleting system deploy keys via the project deploy key API:
• An attacker was able to delete a system-level deploy key by deleting it from a project they owned via the Deploy Key API. See #26243 for more details.
• Ensure export files are removed after a namespace is deleted:
• If a user performed a project export and then deleted (or moved) its containing namespace, an attacker could claim the namespace and access the existing project export if less than an hour had passed. We now ensure that project exports are immediately removed along with the namespace. See #26242 for more details.

What is new in version 8.9.3:

• CE/EE: Import GitHub repositories respecting the API rate limit (!4166)
• CE/EE: Fix todos page throwing errors when you have a project pending deletion (!4300)
• CE/EE: Disable Webhooks before proceeding with the GitHub import (!4470)
• CE/EE: Fix importer for GitHub comments on diff (!4488)
• CE/EE: Adjust the SAML control flow to allow LDAP identities to be added to an existing SAML user (!4498)
• CE/EE: Fix incremental trace upload API when using multi-byte UTF-8 chars in trace (!4541)

What is new in version 8.8.5:

• Fix saving GitLabCiService as Admin Template
• Fix the artifacts storage path
• Update required version of LFS client and separate the docs for users and admins
• Omnibus: create directories for artifacts and lfs-objects
• Omnibus: Make deploy page show on all pages when up

What is new in version 7.7.1:

• Improve @mention autocomplete performance
• Show setup instructions for GitHub import if it is disabled
• Allow use of http for OAuth applications

What is new in version 7.6.2:

• This release fixes the services that were broken with the release of 7.6, including Slack and Hipchat integrations.

What is new in version 7.5.2:

• Don't log Sidekiq arguments by default

What is new in version 7.4.3:

• Fix raw snippets view
• Fix security issue for member api
• Fix buildbox integration

What is new in version 6.5.0:

• Dropdown menus on issue#show page for assignee and milestone (Jason Blanchard)
• Add color custimization and previewing to broadcast messages
• Fixed notes anchors
• Load new comments in issues dynamically
• Added sort options to Public page
• New filters (assigned/authored/all) for Dashboard#issues/merge_requests (sponsored by Say Media)
• Add project visibility icons to dashboard
• Enable secure cookies if https used
• Protect users/confirmation with rack_attack
• Default HTTP headers to protect against MIME-sniffing, force https if enabled
• Bootstrap 3 with responsive UI
• New repository download formats: tar.bz2, zip, tar (Jason Hollingsworth)
• Restyled accept widgets for MR
• SCSS refactored
• Use jquery timeago plugin
• Fix 500 error for rdoc files
• Ability to customize merge commit message (sponsored by Say Media)
• Search autocomplete via ajax
• Add website url to user profile
• Files API supports base64 encoded content (sponsored by O'Reilly Media)
• Added support for Go's repository retrieval (Bruno Albuquerque)

What is new in version 6.4.0:

• Internal projects:
• Internal projects can be cloned and browsed by any logged in user. It will also be listed on the public access directory for logged in users.
• Side-by-side diff view:
• The unified diff view is still the default but you now can also switch to a side-by-side diff view.
• Archive old projects:
• Archiving a project will mark its repository as read-only. It is hidden from the dashboard and it does not show up in searches.
• Archived projects you have access to will still be listed on your profile page (gitlab.example.com/u/my_user).
• Project web hooks:
• Project web hooks were extended with new types of events. Web hooks can now also be triggered when an issue is created or a merge requst is closed.
• Awesome sorting for the Issues page:
• Thanks to Jason Blanchard for contributing this very useful feature.
• README link at the project home page:
• For projects that have a README that is recognized by GitLab you can now go straight to the README from the project home page.
• And some good news for people who want easier upgrades;
• We included an upgrade script with GitLab CE 6.4. This means you will be able to upgrade to next version (6.5) with just one command.

What is new in version 5.1.0:

• You can login with email or username now
• Corrected project transfer rollback when repository cannot be moved
• Move both repo and wiki when project transfer requrested
• Admin area: project editing was removed from admin namespace
• Access: admin user has now access to any project.

What is new in version 4.1:

• Optional Sign-Up
• Discussions
• Satellites outside of tmp
• Line numbers for blame
• Project public mode
• Public area with unauthorized access
• Load dashboard events with ajax
• Remember dashboard filter in cookies
• Replace resque with sidekiq
• Fix routing issues
• Cleanup rake tasks
• Fix backup/restore
• Show preview for note images
• Improved network-graph
• Reduce amount of gitolite calls
• Ability to add user in all group projects
• Remove deprecated configs
• Replaced Korolev font with open font
• Restyled admin/dashboard page
• Restyled admin/projects page

What is new in version 4.0:

• Application behaviour changes:
• New projects will be namespaced (ex. gitlab/vagrant )
• Every group got own directory in gitolite
• All projects of group will be moved under group directory ( git remote should be updated )
• Projects w/o groups will stay with same remote
• User got username ( For existsing users it will be generated based on email )
• User create project under his username ( ex. randx/my-project )
• User can change username. All projects under his username will be moved
• Group got owner
• Owner can create projects within group
• Owner can access every project within a group
• Admin can transfer any project from one namespace(group, user, global) to another
• Group or user is a namespace for project. Owner of namespace is an owner of project
• Other changes:
• Better PostgreSQL support
• Added email notificatino on project move
• Fixed email notification on issue close/reopen
• Reorganized settings
• Fixed commits compare
• Update the UI to allow downloading Patch or Diff for Commit, MR
• Milestones can be closed now. Milestone stays open unless you close it
• Show comment events on dashboard
• Quick add team members via group#people page
• UI improvements
• In admin area projects, users and groups sorted alphabetically
• Issue management page on dashboard improved
• Better integration with GitLab CI ( requires GitLab CI v1.1.1 )
• What we removed in 4.0:
• gitolite 2 support
• SQLite support (I like it but this database got locked when several users use gitlab at once)
• API v2 support (its simply incompatible with namespaced projects)
• What should be updated during migration:
• gitlab.yml config
• gitolite post-receive hooks
• permissions on /home/git/repositories/
• python2 symlink

Requirements:

• Ruby
• MySQL Community Edition
• GIT
• gitolite
• Redis