GitLab Documentation

Welcome to GitLab, a Git-based fully featured platform for software development!

GitLab offers the most scalable Git-based fully integrated platform for software development, with flexible products and subscription plans:

• GitLab Community Edition (CE) is an opensource product, self-hosted, free to use. Every feature available in GitLab CE is also available on GitLab Enterprise Edition (Starter and Premium) and GitLab.com.
• GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) is an opencore product, self-hosted, fully featured solution of GitLab, available under distinct subscriptions: GitLab Enterprise Edition Starter (EES) and GitLab Enterprise Edition Premium (EEP).
• GitLab.com: SaaS GitLab solution, with free and paid subscriptions. GitLab.com is hosted by GitLab, Inc., and administrated by GitLab (users don't have access to admin settings).

GitLab EE contains all features available in GitLab CE, plus premium features available in each version: Enterprise Edition Starter (EES) and Enterprise Edition Premium (EEP). Everything available in EES is also available in EEP.

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Shortcuts to GitLab's most visited docs:

GitLab CI/CD	Other
Quick start guide	API
Configuring .gitlab-ci.yml	SSH authentication
Using Docker images	GitLab Pages

• User documentation
• Administrator documentation
• Technical Articles

Getting started with GitLab

• GitLab Basics: Start working on your command line and on GitLab.
• GitLab Workflow: Enhance your workflow with the best of GitLab Workflow.
  • See also GitLab Workflow - an overview.
• GitLab Markdown: GitLab's advanced formatting system (GitLab Flavored Markdown).
• GitLab Quick Actions: Textual shortcuts for common actions on issues or merge requests that are usually done by clicking buttons or dropdowns in GitLab's UI.
• Auto DevOps

User account

• User account: Manage your account
  • Authentication: Account security with two-factor authentication, setup your ssh keys and deploy keys for secure access to your projects.
  • Profile settings: Manage your profile settings, two factor authentication and more.
• User permissions: Learn what each role in a project (external/guest/reporter/developer/master/owner) can do.

Projects and groups

• Projects:
  • Project settings
  • Create a project
  • Fork a project
  • Importing and exporting projects between instances.
  • Project access: Setting up your project's visibility to public, internal, or private.
  • GitLab Pages: Build, test, and deploy your static website with GitLab Pages.
• Groups: Organize your projects in groups.
  • Subgroups
  • (EEU) Epics
• Search through GitLab: Search for issues, merge requests, projects, groups, todos, and issues in Issue Boards.
  • (EES/EEP) Advanced Global Search: Leverage Elasticsearch for faster, more advanced code search across your entire GitLab instance.
  • (EES/EEP) Advanced Syntax Search: Use advanced queries for more targeted search results.
• Snippets: Snippets allow you to create little bits of code.
• Wikis: Enhance your repository documentation with built-in wikis.
• GitLab Pages: Build, test, and deploy your static website with GitLab Pages.
• (EEP) GitLab Service Desk: A simple way to allow people to create issues in your GitLab instance without needing their own user account.
• (EES/EEP) Contribution Analytics: See detailed statistics of projects' contributors.

Repository

Manage your repositories from the UI (user interface):

• Files
  • Create a file
  • Upload a file
  • File templates
  • Create a directory
  • Start a merge request (when committing via UI)
  • (EES/EEP) Lock a file: Lock a file to avoid merge conflicts.
• Branches
  • Default branch
  • Create a branch
  • Protected branches
  • Delete merged branches
• Commits
  • Signing commits: use GPG to sign your commits.
• (EES/EEP) Repository Mirroring
• (EES/EEP) Push rules: Additional control over pushes to your project.
• (EEP) File Locking: Lock a file to avoid merge conflicts.

Issues and Merge Requests (MRs)

• Discussions: Threads, comments, and resolvable discussions in issues, commits, and merge requests.
• Issues
• Project issue Board
• (EEP) Group Issue Boards
• (EES/EEP) Related Issues: create a relationship between issues
• Issues and merge requests templates: Create templates for submitting new issues and merge requests.
• Labels: Categorize your issues or merge requests based on descriptive titles.
• Merge Requests
  • Work In Progress Merge Requests
  • Merge Request discussion resolution: Resolve discussions, move discussions in a merge request to an issue, only allow merge requests to be merged if all discussions are resolved.
  • (EES/EEP) Merge Request approval: Make sure every merge request is approved by one or more people before getting merged.
  • Checkout merge requests locally
  • Cherry-pick
• Milestones: Organize issues and merge requests into a cohesive group, optionally setting a due date.
  • (EES/EEP) Burndown Charts: Watch your project's progress throughout a specific milestone.
• Related issues
• Todos: A chronological list of to-dos that are waiting for your input, all in a simple dashboard.

Git and GitLab

• Git: Getting started with Git, branching strategies, Git LFS, advanced use.
• Git cheatsheet: Download a PDF describing the most used Git operations.
• GitLab Flow: explore the best of Git with the GitLab Flow strategy.

Migrate and import your projects from other platforms

• Importing to GitLab: Import your projects from GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab.com, FogBugz and SVN into GitLab.
• Migrating from SVN: Convert a SVN repository to Git and GitLab.

Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment

• GitLab CI: Explore the features and capabilities of Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment with GitLab.
  • Auto Deploy: Configure GitLab CI for the deployment of your application.
  • Review Apps: Preview changes to your app right from a merge request.
  • (EEP) Deploy Boards: View of the current health and status of each CI environment running on Kubernetes, displaying the status of the pods in the deployment.
  • (EEP) Canary Deployments: A popular CI strategy, where a small portion of the fleet is updated to the new version first.
• GitLab Cycle Analytics: Cycle Analytics measures the time it takes to go from an idea to production for each project you have.
• GitLab Container Registry: Learn how to use GitLab's built-in Container Registry.

Automation

• API: Automate GitLab via a simple and powerful API.
• GitLab Webhooks: Let GitLab notify you when new code has been pushed to your project.

Integrations

• Project Services: Integrate a project with external services, such as CI and chat.
• GitLab Integration: Integrate with multiple third-party services with GitLab to allow external issue trackers and external authentication.
• Trello Power-Up: Integrate with GitLab's Trello Power-Up
• (EEP) JIRA Development Panel: See GitLab information in the JIRA Development Panel

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Administrator documentation

Learn how to administer your GitLab instance. Regular users don't have access to GitLab administration tools and settings.

Install, update, upgrade, migrate

• Install: Requirements, directory structures and installation from source.
• Mattermost: Integrate Mattermost with your GitLab installation.
• Migrate GitLab CI to CE/EE: If you have an old GitLab installation (older than 8.0), follow this guide to migrate your existing GitLab CI data to GitLab CE/EE.
• Restart GitLab: Learn how to restart GitLab and its components.
• Update: Update guides to upgrade your installation.
• Upload your GitLab License Upload the license you purchased for GitLab Enterprise Edition to unlock its features.

User permissions

• Access restrictions: Define which Git access protocols can be used to talk to GitLab
• Authentication/Authorization: Enforce 2FA, configure external authentication with LDAP, SAML, CAS and additional Omniauth providers.
  • (EES/EEP) Sync LDAP
  • (EES/EEP) Kerberos authentication

Features

• Container Registry: Configure Docker Registry with GitLab.
• Custom Git hooks: Custom Git hooks (on the filesystem) for when webhooks aren't enough.
• Git LFS configuration: Learn how to use LFS under GitLab.
• GitLab Pages configuration: Configure GitLab Pages.
• High Availability: Configure multiple servers for scaling or high availability.
• User cohorts: View user activity over time.
• Web terminals: Provide terminal access to environments from within GitLab.
• (EES/EEP) Audit logs and events: View the changes made within the GitLab server.
• (EES/EEP) Elasticsearch: Enable Elasticsearch which powers GitLab's Advanced Global Search. Useful when you deal with a huge amount of data.
• (EES/EEP) Email users: Email GitLab users from within GitLab.
• (EES/EEP) Limit project size: Set a hard limit for your repositories' size.
• (EEP) Auditor users: Users with read-only access to all projects, groups, and other resources on the GitLab instance.
• (EEP) GitLab GEO: Replicate your GitLab instance to other geographical locations as a read-only fully operational version.
• (EEP) Pivotal Tile: Deploy GitLab as a pre-configured appliance using Ops Manager (BOSH) for Pivotal Cloud Foundry.
• (EES/EEP) Database load balancing: Distribute database queries among multiple database servers.
• (EES/EEP) Omnibus support for external MySQL DB: Omnibus package supports configuring an external MySQL database.
• (EES/EEP) Omnibus support for log forwarding
• GitLab CI
  • CI admin settings: Define max artifacts size and expiration time.

Integrations

• Integrations: How to integrate with systems such as JIRA, Redmine, Twitter.
• Mattermost: Set up GitLab with Mattermost.
• (EES/EEP) Jenkins: Set up GitLab with Jenkins.

Monitoring

• GitLab performance monitoring with InfluxDB: Configure GitLab and InfluxDB for measuring performance metrics.
• GitLab performance monitoring with Prometheus: Configure GitLab and Prometheus for measuring performance metrics.
• Monitoring uptime: Check the server status using the health check endpoint.
• Monitoring GitHub imports

Performance

• Housekeeping: Keep your Git repository tidy and fast.
• Operations: Keeping GitLab up and running.
• Polling: Configure how often the GitLab UI polls for updates.
• Request Profiling: Get a detailed profile on slow requests.
• Performance Bar: Get performance information for the current page.

Customization

• Adjust your instance's timezone: Customize the default time zone of GitLab.
• Environment variables: Supported environment variables that can be used to override their defaults values in order to configure GitLab.
• Header logo: Change the logo on the overall page and email header.
• Issue closing pattern: Customize how to close an issue from commit messages.
• Libravatar: Use Libravatar instead of Gravatar for user avatars.
• Welcome message: Add a custom welcome message to the sign-in page.

Admin tools

• Gitaly: Configuring Gitaly, GitLab's Git repository storage service
• Raketasks: Backups, maintenance, automatic webhook setup and the importing of projects.
  • Backup and restore: Backup and restore your GitLab instance.
• Reply by email: Allow users to comment on issues and merge requests by replying to notification emails.
• Repository checks: Periodic Git repository checks.
• Repository storage paths: Manage the paths used to store repositories.
• Security: Learn what you can do to further secure your GitLab instance.
• System hooks: Notifications when users, projects and keys are changed.

Troubleshooting

• Debugging tips: Tips to debug problems when things go wrong
• Log system: Where to look for logs.
• Sidekiq Troubleshooting: Debug when Sidekiq appears hung and is not processing jobs.

Contributor documentation

• Development: All styleguides and explanations how to contribute.
• Legal: Contributor license agreements.
• Writing documentation: Contributing to GitLab Docs.