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GitLab CEO here. Awesome to see this article! Ask me anything.

by sytse 11y ago

rpglover64 11y ago
Thank you for doing an AMA! I know I'm late to the party, but I have an experience-report/feature-request/question: I tried to use GitLab in a classroom setting, and it went okay. One of the reasons we decided against using it the next year was the apparent lack of an archival backup feature (c.f. my Stack Exchange [question](http://serverfault.com/q/627618/172148 http://serverfault.com/q/627618/172148) on the matter.) We'd like to start completely fresh every year, so that former course assistants and students don't have access, but we'd also like to keep around the old data (for various reasons). Given that GitLab can only restore a backup to the same version that generated it, the only option this left us with was to archive the whole VM, which just feels sloppy. I understand that this feature is not a priority and is a relatively large technical undertaking, so I'm not holding my breath on it getting implemented; even so, I thought that sharing my experience would be valuable. Once again, thank you for engaging with the community and for such a great product.
- sytse 11y ago
  It is tricky to restore a backup on a newer version. I think archiving the whole VM makes sense. Another solution would be to start with a fresh namespace/group each year instead of a fresh server.
matheweis 11y ago
Concerned about the long term implications of the high growth startup model... Gitlab is awesome and all that, but how can I be sure the free version will stay that way in the long run? Is the free (free as in beer, I'm not an open source zealot otherwise) Gitlab not just a part of the conversion funnel, eventually made unsustainable once growth plateaus?
- sytse 11y ago
  Thanks for your question! We're a VC backed startup so we have to have a so called liquidity event at some point. As explained on https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/ https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/ our goal is to IPO instead of being aquired. This will ensure we can preserve our culture, mission and goals. There will always be an open source version of GitLab, more than 1000 people contributed and it the most popular self-hosted option, used on-premises by more than 100,000 organizations. They will keep going with the open source version, with our without GitLab Inc. But the MySQL purchase by Sun and Oracle has shown what can happen to projects when the company is acquired. The best option we saw is to at least codify our promise to the rest of the community in https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship When we break our promise it is time to fork. Any suggestions are appreciated.
  - matheweis 11y ago
    Thanks for the answer - very helpful! Other (unrelated) minor things: - SAML support exists, but at last check was mostly broken. Universities in particular use SAML over OAuth (See http://www.incommonfederation.org/participants/ http://www.incommonfederation.org/participants/) - Resource usage seems very high for small shops; will there be a GitLab "lite"? ...would be especially awesome if it didn't need a mostly dedicated container and could drop in as a subfolder of an existing site (with minimal resource requirements).
    - sytse 11y ago
      I'm glad to hear my answer was helpful. Saml support should be pretty good, it was contributed by CERN and they use it in production. Please see http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/integration/saml.html http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/integration/saml.html for documentation. If you encounter a bug please create an issue on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues We will try to reduce memory usage by something like 20% in the coming year. We have package for the Raspberry Pi 2 if you're into that. But GitLab will always be large due to its many features. For more details see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/install/requirements.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/inst... If you want something with minimal requirements I recommend Gogs https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/
carussell 11y ago
I'm patiently waiting for you all to decide to focus your main interest on making gitlab.com the best place to host open source projects, while the GitLab EE/on premise stuff turns into a quiet side gig that just happens to bring in some extra cash. Any chance of that happening soon? To rephrase: There are folks willing to give you cash right now to be the host for their projects. Would there be a way to convince you to take it?
- sytse 11y ago
  Thanks for your question! We are trying to make GitLab.com the best place to host open source projects, see https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/ https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/ We do not think that paying for hosting itself makes sense, see https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/#why-gitlab-com-will-be-free-forever https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/#why-gitlab-com-will-be-... Instead of giving cash to use I would encourage people to move their projects and contribute by adding the features they need or helping our people, see https://about.gitlab.com/about/#donations https://about.gitlab.com/about/#donations
  - phillc73 11y ago
    A bit late responding to this thread, due to sleep. I recently started to mirror my repositories between GitHub and GitLab (they're just really small R packages). It was very simple to update my local git config file so that "git push origin master" now pushes changes to both GitHub and GitLab. I've also made it clear in the README how to install from GitLab. Three minor annoyances: * GitLab doesn't support Rmarkdown in .Rmd files, so my vignettes look great on GitHub, but not GitLab. * I wanted to start an R Group (and did so), where people could share their R related projects all in one place. Unfortunately, as the projects are only shared with the group, they don't display when publically looking at the group if not signed in.The group image is also broken. [0] * Relative links don't quite work the same, so some README links still only point to GitHub, as they were broken on the GitLab mirror. (Might just be user error!) I also have a self-hosted installation running for a couple of private projects. It's on a small DO instance and does thrash resources a little, but generally works fine for two developers. Thanks for such a useful product! [0] https://gitlab.com/groups/rstats https://gitlab.com/groups/rstats
deleted 11y ago
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dandelany 11y ago
First off - you guys have a great thing going and I wish you all the luck. What's the current status of the GitLab.com infrastructure? Are you still on Azure, and if so, how has it been? Does it seem like things are humming along and stable now, or do you foresee some more growing pains before things are rock solid?
- sytse 11y ago
  Thanks for asking. We're still on Azure but it seems that most of our initial problems are solved, our uptime has been acceptable. PostgreSQL and Redis are now highly available. Before we call things rock solid we still have to figure out how to cluster our storage https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/1 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/1
dogweather 11y ago
Thanks for jumping in to the thread. I'd really like GitLab to succeed simply because I like the results of healthy competition. So can I name a couple of things that are standing in its way? 1. gitlab.com site search is effectively down. A simple keyword search, e.g. for 'omniauth' takes 45 seconds: https://gitlab.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=omniauth&group_id=&repository_ref= https://gitlab.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=omniauth&gro... I periodically find other site links which are surprisingly slow, like this one. 2. I'd really like to add GitLab oauth2 as a first-class citizen for people to sign in to my apps( e.g. http://nonstop.qa/users/sign_in http://nonstop.qa/users/sign_in ), along with GitHub and Google. Adding those two were easy, but I haven't found a working, maintained Ruby omniauth GitLab adapter. Thanks, and good luck!
- sytse 11y ago
  1. Our Elastic Search import is scheduled to be complete on Thursday. This should be a dramatic improvement http://i.imgur.com/HRawCIC.png http://i.imgur.com/HRawCIC.png 2. GitLab is an OAuth 2.0 provider, for the docs see http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/integration/oauth_provider.html http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/integration/oauth_provider.html I see that there is https://github.com/linchus/omniauth-gitlab https://github.com/linchus/omniauth-gitlab updated 5 months ago, did you try that one?
  - dogweather 11y ago
    Thanks! And yep, I've tried that OAuth provider. This is me, raising an issue about it not working: https://github.com/linchus/omniauth-gitlab/issues/10 https://github.com/linchus/omniauth-gitlab/issues/10
    - sytse 11y ago
      Thanks for opening that issue, I see the maintainer responded within a hour so I hope it will work soon. I offered our help in https://github.com/linchus/omniauth-gitlab/issues/10#issuecomment-183552300 https://github.com/linchus/omniauth-gitlab/issues/10#issueco...
  - 11y ago
kaendfinger 11y ago
Hello! I work at http://dglogik.com http://dglogik.com: I maintain all of our development infrastructure. We have been extremely happy with GitLab! Thanks so much for the work.
- sytse 11y ago
  You're welcome. Happy to hear that, thanks for sharing!
neptunespear 11y ago
Wow, I'm talking directly to the CEO of a high-profile tech company on Hacker News! That means I'm pretty much famous now. It has been said that that GitHub has many killer features that are lacking in Gitlab or Bitbucket (e.g. Github has better issues handling, prettier graphs). Do you agree? And if you do, what features of Gitlab would you like to improve to compete with Github's killer features?
- sytse 11y ago
  The OP talked about GitLab issue features in the article. To see our graphs please look at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/graphs/master https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/graphs/master For features that we like to have please see https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ https://about.gitlab.com/direction/
  - neptunespear 11y ago
    Thanks for pointing out your company's "direction" page, I'm sure that many Github refugees will have plenty of suggestions.
    - sytse 11y ago
      Suggestions are very welcome on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues or as merge requests to the direction page. We add all feature requests to our public tracker https://about.gitlab.com/2015/08/03/almost-everything-we-do-is-now-open/ https://about.gitlab.com/2015/08/03/almost-everything-we-do-...
cm3 11y ago
You're always here answering things related to Gitlab. How do you do get notified of topics?
- sytse 11y ago
  Multiple people mentioned me in our chat channel. But we also have a monitor set up that tracks all mentions of GitLab on the internet. We're working on responding to all people that can use some help with GitLab in https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/support/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/support/
cm3 11y ago
From the website I couldn't tell if Gitlab has builtin CI support or if I have to run the agent on my machines and make them talk to gitlab.com. Which way is it?
- sytse 11y ago
  GitLab CE and EE have built in CI support, making it easy to setup and navigate. But all tests run on agents (we call them runners). As a best practise we advise to host Runners on separate machines (not on the GitLab server). You can use any machine (Windows/OSX/Unix) as a runner so you can test on many platforms. For more information please see https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/ https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/
  - cm3 11y ago
    So is there built-in CI for free open source project hosting?
    - ZenoArrow 11y ago
      GitLab CE is the free edition, so the answer to your question is yes.
      - cm3 11y ago
        Nice, I need to copy one of my projects from github and try the CI (with Windows) support then. Sounds too good to be true.
dman 11y ago
Feature request - allow performance tracking over time allowing these kind of views to be available in gitlab - https://arewefastyet.com/ https://arewefastyet.com/ . One possible workflow - 1. User defines perf metrics in some metadata file in repo. 2. User checks in data for metrics with every commit. 3. Gitlab shows a view of the metrics changing over time.
- sytse 11y ago
  We totally want to do this with GitLab CI. Right now you can have GitLab CI measure your code coverage, see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci/commit/96b17c1735b655f33735eb306f3054dfba752cf6/builds https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci/commit/96b17c1735b65... for an example. We can just add a graph and allow people to add more metrics https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13409 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13409 Obviously you should ensure that your performance tests are run on the same type of machine every time. But you can do this by labeling runners.
  - dman 11y ago
    Thanks for opening the ticket, I have added some comments that capture my use cases to the ticket.
    - sytse 11y ago
      Thanks for https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13409#note_3753579 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13409#note_37... I've asked some people to have a look at it in the issue.
Scarbutt 11y ago
Why is gitlab.com so slow?
- sytse 11y ago
  Because it quickly grew in 2015 https://about.gitlab.com/2016/02/11/gitlab-retrospective/ https://about.gitlab.com/2016/02/11/gitlab-retrospective/ We're working on making it faster in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42
samuelantonioli 11y ago
Thanks for building Gitlab! I'm from Germany and worked at Fraunhofer where Gitlab was used extensively for in-house dev. The first thing I did after joining a small startup was to install gitlab using docker - it is literally faster than setting up a new github account. I also use gitlab's nginx configuration combined with cipherli.st ciphers as a template because it uses best practices. Only one question: We want to use Gitlab CI for Continuous Deployment, but I can't find any meaningful resources to build a django project and deploy it e.g. on another server or docker instance. Do you have any information about this?
- ayufan 11y ago
  You may be interested in this example of Python application (django): http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/ci/examples/test-and-deploy-python-application-to-heroku.html http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/ci/examples/test-and-deploy-python-...
- sytse 11y ago
  We don't have a Django specific example. Our general quickstart is in http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/ci/quick_start/README.html http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/ci/quick_start/README.html and an example for PHP is given in http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/ci/languages/php.html http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/ci/languages/php.html The file we use to test GitLab itself (a Rails app) can be found on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/.gitlab-ci.yml https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/.gitlab-... With the rest of the community we're working on more tutorials, I heard one about iOS projects was pretty close https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/blog-posts/issues/29 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/blog-posts/issues/29 I've create an issue to improve the discoverability of the CI examples https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13410 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13410
  - samuelantonioli 11y ago
    Thanks, the links are pretty helpful - I will try to bend some of the scripts for our needs and maybe contribute a "Testing Python projects" section. Hopefully we can replace TeamCity soon, I'm a big fan of open source and therefore your company ethos. - cheers
dudul 11y ago
Great job on GitLab, I really like it and started migrating my projects from GitHub. One thing: I never managed to make GitLab pages work. It may just be me, but I find the existing documentation very confusing, unclear what should be the name of the repo to host the static website, which conventions are used etc. I would appreciate a better tutorial.
- ayufan 11y ago
  Previously we had problems with usernames/groups that had upper case letters. The recent improvements (8.5) fixes all these problems. Please try it now :)
- sytse 11y ago
  I'm sorry to hear you found the exiting documentation for pages http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/pages/README.html http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/pages/README.html confusing. We are planning to write a blog post about it with a walkthough https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/blog-posts/issues/39 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/blog-posts/issues/39
  - dudul 11y ago
    Awesome, thanks for the fast reply :)
generic_user 11y ago
I would like to know that GitLab will not support Socio-Political entry-ism by instituting a so called 'Code of conduct'. Codes of Conduct are a form of Socio-Political entry-ism by which third party activists try to interject a vaguely defined set of Behavioral, Ideological and Speech codes which participating individuals must accept in order to participate. Once Instituted activists can try and use these 'Codes' as a pretext to attack there perceived political and social enemies in the project. Attempt to expel developers can spread across all social media, email, and any other information that can be dug up. Attempts to redefine project goals and redirect resources away from there original purpose towards social and political objectives set by the entrants are also attempted. Generally turning open productive software communities into unproductive, divisive, monoculture, that serve as ideological vehicles. It is important that FLOSS software development is politically and socially neutral. Open to anyone who wants to contribute and learn and help improve the code. I hope that GitLab will endorse political and ideological neutrality which opens the door for everyone to participate by keeping Codes of Conduct out of your terms of service.
- generic_user 11y ago
  Digging through the site I see you endorse the Contributor Covenant, a prime example of entry-ism written by serial harasser and radical feminist Coraline Ada Ehmke. https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3ab802/warriors_demand_maintainer_removed_from_github/ https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3ab802/warr... Unfortunately until this Code of Conduct is withdrawn and links with serial Harasser and political entriest Coraline Ada Ehmke are removed I can not endorse or contribute to GitLab. I do hope GitLab removes the Contributor Covenant and replaces it with a more honest and inclusive statement.
  - said 11y ago
    I followed the link, and though I did see Caroline Ada trying to bully someone out of a community, I didn't see any evidence GitLab CEO supports the Contributor Covenant.
    - 11y ago
sytse 11y ago
Thanks for the love! I'll be offline for a few hours for dinner, we're celebrating being together for 16 years today.
abledon 11y ago
Hi, Thanks for participating in the community discussions. I have a question/comment in terms of the UI that GitLab provides for developers. Are there any plans to add a customizable dashboard for gitlab? Think social media sites like twitter/fb/g+. They all have notification numbers over the icons signalling the amount of new emails/messages etc.. gitlab needs the option to add these to the sidepanel! It would be so darn useful to have say, 5 extra icon counters for whatever project/merge request search filters one is currently using. e.g. 2 extra sidepanel contexts showing - big red '5' counter on icon for merge requests with author bob, on project xyz. Because bob made 5 comments on merge requests on project xyz - big red '2' counter on icon for merge requests with author karen, bob or steve on project abc. ditto as above. I think extra 'tweakability' features like this for Gitlab's UI would make it easier to manage complex development environments where its necessary to keep an eye on many different scopes around a project. and have the abliity to evolve the dashboard's info display over the projects lifetime as 'hotspots' of attention need to be shifted around to different service codebases and team members. thanks again
- sytse 11y ago
  Douglas is currently working on a 'todo' feature that will have an icon signalling the items you still need to respond to , see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2425 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2425
Jade_Jet 11y ago
Just wanted to say that I use the CE edition (self hosted) at my job and we love it. The built in CI has been a major game changer for us and has really helped in preventing bugs from slipping through on our MR's. Keep doing an awesome job and I'll keep telling people how awesome your product is. Also as an ops engineer I love how hassle free our Gitlab instance has been to maintain.
- sytse 11y ago
  Great to hear that, thanks!
kaendfinger 11y ago
I have a single concern about GitLab. Looking at https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ https://about.gitlab.com/direction/, I feel like there is way too much being labeled as EE only. I understand that GitLab has to make money to survive, however I see a lot of those features as things that are relevant to pure open source projects (private issues are something Open Source projects do actually need for security, think Chromium) and should probably be in CE. I absolutely love GitLab, but the roadmap has me certainly concerned. The following features are most concerning: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/150 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/150 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4176 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4176 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/112 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/112 (This one I am not as much concerned about, it's very complicated it seems, I can understand a bit why this would be EE)
- sytse 11y ago
  Thanks for the feedback and for listing the features that you are concerned about. The squash functionality is likely to stay EE only since it is similar to rebasing. Rebasing is EE only because larger enterprises are more likely to have this workflow. Regarding the 'test the merge' functionality I've only heard requests from large organizations for that, can you detail the context in which you want to use it? The code analytics is a typical enterprise feature in my view. I think that the private/confidential issues in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3678 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3678 is something that are needed for really large organizations and for people hosting on GitLab.com, so in my view it can be EE only. For all of the above I try to keep an open mind, so feel free to push back. Based on discussions here we do decide to merge features into CE, for example the branded homepage https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10931690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10931690
  - eyko 11y ago
    > Regarding the 'test the merge' functionality I've only heard requests from large organizations for that, can you detail the context in which you want to use it? There might be some confirmation bias here going on. In my experience, a lot of enterprise clients I've worked with are using Gitlab. I'm yet to see one major open source project on Gitlab, apart from gitlab itself.
knocte 11y ago
Three questions: a) I know some projects which would love to move to gitlab from sourceforge, but you don't provide mailing lists like the latter, right? b) Why is your git-blame feature so fragile? It barely works for me, almost always shows the "error" page. c) Since you shut down gitorious you have published a mirror to get the data out (thanks! finally!), but I don't find one repository in your list in here :( : https://gitorious.org/index-list.html https://gitorious.org/index-list.html it was called banshee-community-extensions/windows-binaries.git or something like that.
- sytse 11y ago
  a) not yet but we would love to https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4272 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4272 b) I think there is something wrong and have created an issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13413 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13413 c) sorry it took so long for the mirror to be copied to the internet archive, I've asked for help with your question but this will likely take a couple of days.
  - sytse 11y ago
    Regarding point c, is it https://gitorious.org/banshee/windows-binaries https://gitorious.org/banshee/windows-binaries ?
- rolfbj 11y ago
  c) is https://gitorious.org/banshee/windows-binaries.git https://gitorious.org/banshee/windows-binaries.git the one you are looking for?
ggergbh 11y ago
I use GitLab on CentOS 7, self hosted, from source. It works great, I really like this project, I think it beats any alternative hands down. I really like the accurate documentation for upgrading between versions from source (keep it up !). I think there is a very good balance between EE-CE features, I find that the availability of the features is well thought of. I don't use GitLab-CI at the moment (running buildbot), are there any plans to integrate support for builtbot ? or on the other hand, edit history of the CI (in jenkins you can simply delete any entry you'd like). Keep it up ! besides the CI, GitLab offers me everything I currently need. Thanks.
- sytse 11y ago
  Thanks for your kind words, especially about the balance between EE-CE features, this is hard to get right and I appreciate the feedback. We would love to see support for buildbot. I found https://pypi.python.org/pypi/buildbot-gitlab/0.1.2 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/buildbot-gitlab/0.1.2 And with the commit status api introduced in GitLab 8.1 it should be easy for CI products to support GitLab.
  - ggergbh 11y ago
    Thank you for the effort to produce such a system. It's been a long coming for the open source community.
    - sytse 11y ago
      You're very welcome, thanks for using GitLab.
jhasse 11y ago
Am I the only one who hates the new SPA Gitlab UI?
- sytse 11y ago
  I'm sorry to hear you don't like the UI. What do you think we should improve? BTW Technically GitLab is not a SPA, it uses turbolinks to do page loads.
  - jhasse 11y ago
    Basically I just don't like some "features" which are anti-patterns IMHO: * With SPA I mean that clicking on a link, my browser doesn't load a new page, but rather some JavaScript seems to do it. * Depending on the browser width, the description of the icons on the left disappears. It should always be there, I'd rather have a horizontal scrollbar than not knowing which button does what. * Fixed headers. Vertical screen space is the most important thing to me, so there should be nothing on the top blocking the stuff I want to read. Also please don't start to animate it or let the header slide in when I scroll up. * Infinite scrolling. * Icon fonts. I don't like the default font. If I block it, some icons don't work anymore.
    - sytse 11y ago
      1. What is the problem with this? Back links and everything else should still work. And it saves a lot of time. 2. I agree the user should be able to override and made https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13436 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13436 3. Where do we do this? 4. I don't think infinite scrolling is always bad. 5. What do you suggest we do instead? PNG's for all icons are expensive to load.
      - jhasse 11y ago
        1. No, "everything else" doesn't still work. You're reimplementing a browser in JavaScript! For example: There's no spinning loading indication on the left side of my tab. When clicking on a link and pressing back while it's loading, it doesn't abort, but goes back instead. 3. Do you mean the animation? You don't do this yet. 5. SVGs
eknkc 11y ago
GitLab is confusing. I mean, there is gitlab.com, there is ee, weird multi user licenses, community edition, githost etc. you need to simplify entry.
- sytse 11y ago
  Our 4 products offerings are explained on our homepage and https://about.gitlab.com/about/ https://about.gitlab.com/about/ Please let me know how we can improve the explanation. Multi user licenses are common in the industry but I don't like them either so we're switching to subscriptions you can buy per user before either GitLab 8.5 or 8.6.
trendnet 11y ago
Do you have any plans to provide some lightweight project management options in GitLab? I don't even want anything complex. Maybe, just a Trello-Kanban-like view of Issues and a simple burn down chart. With CI and Git/VCS and code review features GitLab could become the only thing a small team should install to go independent.
- sytse 11y ago
  Thanks for asking. As detailed in https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#scope https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#scope we plan to add Huboard as a kanban board and there is currently a bounty for that https://github.com/huboard/huboard/issues/276 https://github.com/huboard/huboard/issues/276 A burndown chart is something we planned to do now that we have issue weights. I couldn't find the issue for it so I created on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13422 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13422
- sytse 11y ago
  Thanks for asking. As detailed in https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#scope https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#scope we plan to add Huboard as a kanban board and there is currently a bounty for that https://github.com/huboard/huboard/issues/276 https://github.com/huboard/huboard/issues/276 A burndown chart is something we planned to do now that we have issue weights. I couldn't find the issue for it so I created on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13422 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13422
Spivak 11y ago
Hello, I am currently very happy with my self-hosted GitLab instance for my personal projects. But I would love to have some of the EE features (both for my workflow and experience working with enterprise tools) and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is. However open source is very important to me so my question is do you think it would ever be possible to purchase a personal use EE instance without license keys, calling home, and under an open source license?
- sytse 11y ago
  Glad to hear you're happy with your self-hosted instance.We're working on single user subscriptions (before either 8.5 or 8.6), our license key doesn't call home and our license will stay proprietary but already allows for modification and publishing patches.
  - fanf2 11y ago
    Allowing your customers to publish their patches is super cool :-)
    - sytse 11y ago
      Thanks, I think the super cool thing is that they actually do it: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/merge_requests?assignee_id=&author_id=&label_name=&milestone_title=&scope=all&sort=id_desc&state=all https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/merge_requests?assig...
wanderr 11y ago
I will probably set up an account soon and try it out for myself but just from looking a gitlab.com it's not entirely clear what difference there is between EE and gitlab.com hosting. Are all the features of EE available on the SAAS version? Why is there so much emphasis on the self hosted options, is that something you are seeing a lot of demand for? I'm finding it hard to come up with a good reason to want to take on the burden of maintaining a source control server when there are good cheap cloud options. Why is the gitlab.com option so cheap, even for corporations even if they pay for support? I understand you're still trying to gain market share more than be profitable right now but as a company paying nothing for the product certainly makes me feel like it might go away at any moment and even if we pay for support we may not receive the level of support that we need. As corporate users, maybe we're not gitlab's target audience right now but aside from those questions it seems like a nice alternative to github, especially with regards to the additional ability to have pull requests rebased before merge...
- sytse 11y ago
  GitLab.com is running GitLab EE. Not all features are available, for example you can't link it to an LDAP server since that requires admin credentials that only GitLab Inc team members have. Our self hosted option currently is more popular than our SaaS one. More than 100,000 organizations use it because they can't use a SaaS for legal, integration, technical and security reasons (want it behind VPN, integrate with other on-premises services, etc.). GitLab.com is free because we make enough money with GitLab EE to pay for it. For more context and to understand why we think this is sustainable please see https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/#why-gitlab-com-will-be-free-forever https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/#why-gitlab-com-will-be-...
acd 11y ago
Thanks for bringing us Gitlab its great and useful!
- sytse 11y ago
  You're very welcome!
NetOpWibby 11y ago
I've started using GitLab Omnibus on my own server and I friggin' love it. I've moved all of my GitHub projects over to GitLab and haven't been happier to know that if I want to change something, I can. That being said, I do have some questions. 1) Is there a way for me to make modifications to the front-end and still keep those changes when I upgrade? 2) What kind of server should I be using the fastest git pulls/pushes? Currently, my server is running on a 30GB SSD DO droplet with 1GB RAM.
- sytse 11y ago
  Glad to hear you love GitLab. 1. No, but after a discussion on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10931690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10931690 we did decide to merge the branded login page into CE. If you are looking for another front-end change please let me know. 2. Per our requirements https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/install/requirements.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/inst... I would advise 2GB of RAM.
  - NetOpWibby 11y ago
    I'm a front-end developer and designer so I love tweaking things to my liking. There are links that don't look like links and padding issues in a few places. The ability to choose custom fonts from Brick.im would be great too. If nothing else, I'll make the changes and figure out how to write a script that brings my changes back after I update/upgrade. Thanks for the requirements link, I must've missed that.
    - sytse 11y ago
      Certainly there is a lot of room for improving links and padding. Have you considered contributing them to GitLab? To get started see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-development-kit https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-development-kit Having people pick custom fonts might make it hard to get the design right for everyone. Reapplying changes in Omnibus is hard since it is shipped without a git repo, so you can't use git stash or git merge. You would need to switch to an installation from source but we don't recommend that. I really hope you can contribute the changes you would like to see, GitLab's frontend can still use a lot of polish.
kmch 11y ago
I know this isn't good feedback and I'm sorry for it, but when I tried using GitLab for a group project in school I had some trouble adding everybody to the repository and then letting them pull through the GitHub client. In the end I had to switch to using GitHub for that project, because the others got impatient and it was hard to even convince them of using git at all. Maybe it's just me, but it'd be nice if you could make that experience easier and would maybe offer a client of your own with really basic features for not-so-technical people to use.
- sytse 11y ago
  I'm sorry to hear that. Why was it hard adding people to the repository?

GitLab CEO here. Awesome to see this article! Ask me anything.

by sytse 11y ago

GitLab CEO here. Awesome to see this article! Ask me anything.

Thank you for doing an AMA! I know I'm late to the party, but I have an experience-report/feature-request/question: I tried to use GitLab in a classroom setting, and it went okay. One of the reasons we decided against using it the next year was the apparent lack of an archival backup feature (c.f. my Stack Exchange [question](http://serverfault.com/q/627618/172148 http://serverfault.com/q/627618/172148) on the matter.) We'd like to start completely fresh every year, so that former course assistants and students don't have access, but we'd also like to keep around the old data (for various reasons). Given that GitLab can only restore a backup to the same version that generated it, the only option this left us with was to archive the whole VM, which just feels sloppy. I understand that this feature is not a priority and is a relatively large technical undertaking, so I'm not holding my breath on it getting implemented; even so, I thought that sharing my experience would be valuable. Once again, thank you for engaging with the community and for such a great product.

sytse 11y ago
It is tricky to restore a backup on a newer version. I think archiving the whole VM makes sense. Another solution would be to start with a fresh namespace/group each year instead of a fresh server.

matheweis 11y ago

Concerned about the long term implications of the high growth startup model... Gitlab is awesome and all that, but how can I be sure the free version will stay that way in the long run? Is the free (free as in beer, I'm not an open source zealot otherwise) Gitlab not just a part of the conversion funnel, eventually made unsustainable once growth plateaus?

sytse 11y ago
Thanks for your question! We're a VC backed startup so we have to have a so called liquidity event at some point. As explained on https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/ https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/ our goal is to IPO instead of being aquired. This will ensure we can preserve our culture, mission and goals. There will always be an open source version of GitLab, more than 1000 people contributed and it the most popular self-hosted option, used on-premises by more than 100,000 organizations. They will keep going with the open source version, with our without GitLab Inc. But the MySQL purchase by Sun and Oracle has shown what can happen to projects when the company is acquired. The best option we saw is to at least codify our promise to the rest of the community in https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship When we break our promise it is time to fork. Any suggestions are appreciated.
- matheweis 11y ago
  Thanks for the answer - very helpful! Other (unrelated) minor things: - SAML support exists, but at last check was mostly broken. Universities in particular use SAML over OAuth (See http://www.incommonfederation.org/participants/ http://www.incommonfederation.org/participants/) - Resource usage seems very high for small shops; will there be a GitLab "lite"? ...would be especially awesome if it didn't need a mostly dedicated container and could drop in as a subfolder of an existing site (with minimal resource requirements).
  - sytse 11y ago
    I'm glad to hear my answer was helpful. Saml support should be pretty good, it was contributed by CERN and they use it in production. Please see http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/integration/saml.html http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/integration/saml.html for documentation. If you encounter a bug please create an issue on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues We will try to reduce memory usage by something like 20% in the coming year. We have package for the Raspberry Pi 2 if you're into that. But GitLab will always be large due to its many features. For more details see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/install/requirements.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/inst... If you want something with minimal requirements I recommend Gogs https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/

carussell 11y ago

I'm patiently waiting for you all to decide to focus your main interest on making gitlab.com the best place to host open source projects, while the GitLab EE/on premise stuff turns into a quiet side gig that just happens to bring in some extra cash. Any chance of that happening soon? To rephrase: There are folks willing to give you cash right now to be the host for their projects. Would there be a way to convince you to take it?

sytse 11y ago
Thanks for your question! We are trying to make GitLab.com the best place to host open source projects, see https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/ https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/ We do not think that paying for hosting itself makes sense, see https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/#why-gitlab-com-will-be-free-forever https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/#why-gitlab-com-will-be-... Instead of giving cash to use I would encourage people to move their projects and contribute by adding the features they need or helping our people, see https://about.gitlab.com/about/#donations https://about.gitlab.com/about/#donations
- phillc73 11y ago
  A bit late responding to this thread, due to sleep. I recently started to mirror my repositories between GitHub and GitLab (they're just really small R packages). It was very simple to update my local git config file so that "git push origin master" now pushes changes to both GitHub and GitLab. I've also made it clear in the README how to install from GitLab. Three minor annoyances: * GitLab doesn't support Rmarkdown in .Rmd files, so my vignettes look great on GitHub, but not GitLab. * I wanted to start an R Group (and did so), where people could share their R related projects all in one place. Unfortunately, as the projects are only shared with the group, they don't display when publically looking at the group if not signed in.The group image is also broken. [0] * Relative links don't quite work the same, so some README links still only point to GitHub, as they were broken on the GitLab mirror. (Might just be user error!) I also have a self-hosted installation running for a couple of private projects. It's on a small DO instance and does thrash resources a little, but generally works fine for two developers. Thanks for such a useful product! [0] https://gitlab.com/groups/rstats https://gitlab.com/groups/rstats

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

dandelany 11y ago

First off - you guys have a great thing going and I wish you all the luck. What's the current status of the GitLab.com infrastructure? Are you still on Azure, and if so, how has it been? Does it seem like things are humming along and stable now, or do you foresee some more growing pains before things are rock solid?

sytse 11y ago
Thanks for asking. We're still on Azure but it seems that most of our initial problems are solved, our uptime has been acceptable. PostgreSQL and Redis are now highly available. Before we call things rock solid we still have to figure out how to cluster our storage https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/1 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/1

dogweather 11y ago

Thanks for jumping in to the thread. I'd really like GitLab to succeed simply because I like the results of healthy competition. So can I name a couple of things that are standing in its way? 1. gitlab.com site search is effectively down. A simple keyword search, e.g. for 'omniauth' takes 45 seconds: https://gitlab.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=omniauth&group_id=&repository_ref= https://gitlab.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=omniauth&gro... I periodically find other site links which are surprisingly slow, like this one. 2. I'd really like to add GitLab oauth2 as a first-class citizen for people to sign in to my apps( e.g. http://nonstop.qa/users/sign_in http://nonstop.qa/users/sign_in ), along with GitHub and Google. Adding those two were easy, but I haven't found a working, maintained Ruby omniauth GitLab adapter. Thanks, and good luck!

sytse 11y ago
1. Our Elastic Search import is scheduled to be complete on Thursday. This should be a dramatic improvement http://i.imgur.com/HRawCIC.png http://i.imgur.com/HRawCIC.png 2. GitLab is an OAuth 2.0 provider, for the docs see http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/integration/oauth_provider.html http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/integration/oauth_provider.html I see that there is https://github.com/linchus/omniauth-gitlab https://github.com/linchus/omniauth-gitlab updated 5 months ago, did you try that one?
- dogweather 11y ago
  Thanks! And yep, I've tried that OAuth provider. This is me, raising an issue about it not working: https://github.com/linchus/omniauth-gitlab/issues/10 https://github.com/linchus/omniauth-gitlab/issues/10
  - sytse 11y ago
    Thanks for opening that issue, I see the maintainer responded within a hour so I hope it will work soon. I offered our help in https://github.com/linchus/omniauth-gitlab/issues/10#issuecomment-183552300 https://github.com/linchus/omniauth-gitlab/issues/10#issueco...
- 11y ago

kaendfinger 11y ago

Hello! I work at http://dglogik.com http://dglogik.com: I maintain all of our development infrastructure. We have been extremely happy with GitLab! Thanks so much for the work.

sytse 11y ago
You're welcome. Happy to hear that, thanks for sharing!

neptunespear 11y ago

Wow, I'm talking directly to the CEO of a high-profile tech company on Hacker News! That means I'm pretty much famous now. It has been said that that GitHub has many killer features that are lacking in Gitlab or Bitbucket (e.g. Github has better issues handling, prettier graphs). Do you agree? And if you do, what features of Gitlab would you like to improve to compete with Github's killer features?

sytse 11y ago
The OP talked about GitLab issue features in the article. To see our graphs please look at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/graphs/master https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/graphs/master For features that we like to have please see https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ https://about.gitlab.com/direction/
- neptunespear 11y ago
  Thanks for pointing out your company's "direction" page, I'm sure that many Github refugees will have plenty of suggestions.
  - sytse 11y ago
    Suggestions are very welcome on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues or as merge requests to the direction page. We add all feature requests to our public tracker https://about.gitlab.com/2015/08/03/almost-everything-we-do-is-now-open/ https://about.gitlab.com/2015/08/03/almost-everything-we-do-...

cm3 11y ago

You're always here answering things related to Gitlab. How do you do get notified of topics?

sytse 11y ago
Multiple people mentioned me in our chat channel. But we also have a monitor set up that tracks all mentions of GitLab on the internet. We're working on responding to all people that can use some help with GitLab in https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/support/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/support/

cm3 11y ago

From the website I couldn't tell if Gitlab has builtin CI support or if I have to run the agent on my machines and make them talk to gitlab.com. Which way is it?

sytse 11y ago
GitLab CE and EE have built in CI support, making it easy to setup and navigate. But all tests run on agents (we call them runners). As a best practise we advise to host Runners on separate machines (not on the GitLab server). You can use any machine (Windows/OSX/Unix) as a runner so you can test on many platforms. For more information please see https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/ https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/
- cm3 11y ago
  So is there built-in CI for free open source project hosting?
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    GitLab CE is the free edition, so the answer to your question is yes.
    - cm3 11y ago
      Nice, I need to copy one of my projects from github and try the CI (with Windows) support then. Sounds too good to be true.

dman 11y ago

Feature request - allow performance tracking over time allowing these kind of views to be available in gitlab - https://arewefastyet.com/ https://arewefastyet.com/ . One possible workflow - 1. User defines perf metrics in some metadata file in repo. 2. User checks in data for metrics with every commit. 3. Gitlab shows a view of the metrics changing over time.

sytse 11y ago
We totally want to do this with GitLab CI. Right now you can have GitLab CI measure your code coverage, see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci/commit/96b17c1735b655f33735eb306f3054dfba752cf6/builds https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci/commit/96b17c1735b65... for an example. We can just add a graph and allow people to add more metrics https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13409 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13409 Obviously you should ensure that your performance tests are run on the same type of machine every time. But you can do this by labeling runners.
- dman 11y ago
  Thanks for opening the ticket, I have added some comments that capture my use cases to the ticket.
  - sytse 11y ago
    Thanks for https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13409#note_3753579 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13409#note_37... I've asked some people to have a look at it in the issue.

Scarbutt 11y ago

Why is gitlab.com so slow?

sytse 11y ago
Because it quickly grew in 2015 https://about.gitlab.com/2016/02/11/gitlab-retrospective/ https://about.gitlab.com/2016/02/11/gitlab-retrospective/ We're working on making it faster in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42

samuelantonioli 11y ago

Thanks for building Gitlab! I'm from Germany and worked at Fraunhofer where Gitlab was used extensively for in-house dev. The first thing I did after joining a small startup was to install gitlab using docker - it is literally faster than setting up a new github account. I also use gitlab's nginx configuration combined with cipherli.st ciphers as a template because it uses best practices. Only one question: We want to use Gitlab CI for Continuous Deployment, but I can't find any meaningful resources to build a django project and deploy it e.g. on another server or docker instance. Do you have any information about this?

ayufan 11y ago
You may be interested in this example of Python application (django): http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/ci/examples/test-and-deploy-python-application-to-heroku.html http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/ci/examples/test-and-deploy-python-...
sytse 11y ago
We don't have a Django specific example. Our general quickstart is in http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/ci/quick_start/README.html http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/ci/quick_start/README.html and an example for PHP is given in http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/ci/languages/php.html http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/ci/languages/php.html The file we use to test GitLab itself (a Rails app) can be found on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/.gitlab-ci.yml https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/.gitlab-... With the rest of the community we're working on more tutorials, I heard one about iOS projects was pretty close https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/blog-posts/issues/29 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/blog-posts/issues/29 I've create an issue to improve the discoverability of the CI examples https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13410 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13410
- samuelantonioli 11y ago
  Thanks, the links are pretty helpful - I will try to bend some of the scripts for our needs and maybe contribute a "Testing Python projects" section. Hopefully we can replace TeamCity soon, I'm a big fan of open source and therefore your company ethos. - cheers

dudul 11y ago

Great job on GitLab, I really like it and started migrating my projects from GitHub. One thing: I never managed to make GitLab pages work. It may just be me, but I find the existing documentation very confusing, unclear what should be the name of the repo to host the static website, which conventions are used etc. I would appreciate a better tutorial.

ayufan 11y ago
Previously we had problems with usernames/groups that had upper case letters. The recent improvements (8.5) fixes all these problems. Please try it now :)
sytse 11y ago
I'm sorry to hear you found the exiting documentation for pages http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/pages/README.html http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/pages/README.html confusing. We are planning to write a blog post about it with a walkthough https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/blog-posts/issues/39 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/blog-posts/issues/39
- dudul 11y ago
  Awesome, thanks for the fast reply :)

generic_user 11y ago

I would like to know that GitLab will not support Socio-Political entry-ism by instituting a so called 'Code of conduct'. Codes of Conduct are a form of Socio-Political entry-ism by which third party activists try to interject a vaguely defined set of Behavioral, Ideological and Speech codes which participating individuals must accept in order to participate. Once Instituted activists can try and use these 'Codes' as a pretext to attack there perceived political and social enemies in the project. Attempt to expel developers can spread across all social media, email, and any other information that can be dug up. Attempts to redefine project goals and redirect resources away from there original purpose towards social and political objectives set by the entrants are also attempted. Generally turning open productive software communities into unproductive, divisive, monoculture, that serve as ideological vehicles. It is important that FLOSS software development is politically and socially neutral. Open to anyone who wants to contribute and learn and help improve the code. I hope that GitLab will endorse political and ideological neutrality which opens the door for everyone to participate by keeping Codes of Conduct out of your terms of service.

generic_user 11y ago
Digging through the site I see you endorse the Contributor Covenant, a prime example of entry-ism written by serial harasser and radical feminist Coraline Ada Ehmke. https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3ab802/warriors_demand_maintainer_removed_from_github/ https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/3ab802/warr... Unfortunately until this Code of Conduct is withdrawn and links with serial Harasser and political entriest Coraline Ada Ehmke are removed I can not endorse or contribute to GitLab. I do hope GitLab removes the Contributor Covenant and replaces it with a more honest and inclusive statement.
- said 11y ago
  I followed the link, and though I did see Caroline Ada trying to bully someone out of a community, I didn't see any evidence GitLab CEO supports the Contributor Covenant.
  - 11y ago

sytse 11y ago

Thanks for the love! I'll be offline for a few hours for dinner, we're celebrating being together for 16 years today.

abledon 11y ago

Hi, Thanks for participating in the community discussions. I have a question/comment in terms of the UI that GitLab provides for developers. Are there any plans to add a customizable dashboard for gitlab? Think social media sites like twitter/fb/g+. They all have notification numbers over the icons signalling the amount of new emails/messages etc.. gitlab needs the option to add these to the sidepanel! It would be so darn useful to have say, 5 extra icon counters for whatever project/merge request search filters one is currently using. e.g. 2 extra sidepanel contexts showing - big red '5' counter on icon for merge requests with author bob, on project xyz. Because bob made 5 comments on merge requests on project xyz - big red '2' counter on icon for merge requests with author karen, bob or steve on project abc. ditto as above. I think extra 'tweakability' features like this for Gitlab's UI would make it easier to manage complex development environments where its necessary to keep an eye on many different scopes around a project. and have the abliity to evolve the dashboard's info display over the projects lifetime as 'hotspots' of attention need to be shifted around to different service codebases and team members. thanks again

sytse 11y ago
Douglas is currently working on a 'todo' feature that will have an icon signalling the items you still need to respond to , see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2425 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2425

Jade_Jet 11y ago

Just wanted to say that I use the CE edition (self hosted) at my job and we love it. The built in CI has been a major game changer for us and has really helped in preventing bugs from slipping through on our MR's. Keep doing an awesome job and I'll keep telling people how awesome your product is. Also as an ops engineer I love how hassle free our Gitlab instance has been to maintain.

sytse 11y ago
Great to hear that, thanks!

kaendfinger 11y ago

I have a single concern about GitLab. Looking at https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ https://about.gitlab.com/direction/, I feel like there is way too much being labeled as EE only. I understand that GitLab has to make money to survive, however I see a lot of those features as things that are relevant to pure open source projects (private issues are something Open Source projects do actually need for security, think Chromium) and should probably be in CE. I absolutely love GitLab, but the roadmap has me certainly concerned. The following features are most concerning: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/150 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/150 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4176 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4176 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/112 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/112 (This one I am not as much concerned about, it's very complicated it seems, I can understand a bit why this would be EE)

sytse 11y ago
Thanks for the feedback and for listing the features that you are concerned about. The squash functionality is likely to stay EE only since it is similar to rebasing. Rebasing is EE only because larger enterprises are more likely to have this workflow. Regarding the 'test the merge' functionality I've only heard requests from large organizations for that, can you detail the context in which you want to use it? The code analytics is a typical enterprise feature in my view. I think that the private/confidential issues in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3678 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3678 is something that are needed for really large organizations and for people hosting on GitLab.com, so in my view it can be EE only. For all of the above I try to keep an open mind, so feel free to push back. Based on discussions here we do decide to merge features into CE, for example the branded homepage https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10931690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10931690
- eyko 11y ago
  > Regarding the 'test the merge' functionality I've only heard requests from large organizations for that, can you detail the context in which you want to use it? There might be some confirmation bias here going on. In my experience, a lot of enterprise clients I've worked with are using Gitlab. I'm yet to see one major open source project on Gitlab, apart from gitlab itself.

knocte 11y ago

Three questions: a) I know some projects which would love to move to gitlab from sourceforge, but you don't provide mailing lists like the latter, right? b) Why is your git-blame feature so fragile? It barely works for me, almost always shows the "error" page. c) Since you shut down gitorious you have published a mirror to get the data out (thanks! finally!), but I don't find one repository in your list in here :( : https://gitorious.org/index-list.html https://gitorious.org/index-list.html it was called banshee-community-extensions/windows-binaries.git or something like that.

sytse 11y ago
a) not yet but we would love to https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4272 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4272 b) I think there is something wrong and have created an issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13413 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13413 c) sorry it took so long for the mirror to be copied to the internet archive, I've asked for help with your question but this will likely take a couple of days.
- sytse 11y ago
  Regarding point c, is it https://gitorious.org/banshee/windows-binaries https://gitorious.org/banshee/windows-binaries ?
rolfbj 11y ago
c) is https://gitorious.org/banshee/windows-binaries.git https://gitorious.org/banshee/windows-binaries.git the one you are looking for?

ggergbh 11y ago

I use GitLab on CentOS 7, self hosted, from source. It works great, I really like this project, I think it beats any alternative hands down. I really like the accurate documentation for upgrading between versions from source (keep it up !). I think there is a very good balance between EE-CE features, I find that the availability of the features is well thought of. I don't use GitLab-CI at the moment (running buildbot), are there any plans to integrate support for builtbot ? or on the other hand, edit history of the CI (in jenkins you can simply delete any entry you'd like). Keep it up ! besides the CI, GitLab offers me everything I currently need. Thanks.

sytse 11y ago
Thanks for your kind words, especially about the balance between EE-CE features, this is hard to get right and I appreciate the feedback. We would love to see support for buildbot. I found https://pypi.python.org/pypi/buildbot-gitlab/0.1.2 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/buildbot-gitlab/0.1.2 And with the commit status api introduced in GitLab 8.1 it should be easy for CI products to support GitLab.
- ggergbh 11y ago
  Thank you for the effort to produce such a system. It's been a long coming for the open source community.
  - sytse 11y ago
    You're very welcome, thanks for using GitLab.

jhasse 11y ago

Am I the only one who hates the new SPA Gitlab UI?

sytse 11y ago
I'm sorry to hear you don't like the UI. What do you think we should improve? BTW Technically GitLab is not a SPA, it uses turbolinks to do page loads.
- jhasse 11y ago
  Basically I just don't like some "features" which are anti-patterns IMHO: * With SPA I mean that clicking on a link, my browser doesn't load a new page, but rather some JavaScript seems to do it. * Depending on the browser width, the description of the icons on the left disappears. It should always be there, I'd rather have a horizontal scrollbar than not knowing which button does what. * Fixed headers. Vertical screen space is the most important thing to me, so there should be nothing on the top blocking the stuff I want to read. Also please don't start to animate it or let the header slide in when I scroll up. * Infinite scrolling. * Icon fonts. I don't like the default font. If I block it, some icons don't work anymore.
  - sytse 11y ago
    1. What is the problem with this? Back links and everything else should still work. And it saves a lot of time. 2. I agree the user should be able to override and made https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13436 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13436 3. Where do we do this? 4. I don't think infinite scrolling is always bad. 5. What do you suggest we do instead? PNG's for all icons are expensive to load.
    - jhasse 11y ago
      1. No, "everything else" doesn't still work. You're reimplementing a browser in JavaScript! For example: There's no spinning loading indication on the left side of my tab. When clicking on a link and pressing back while it's loading, it doesn't abort, but goes back instead. 3. Do you mean the animation? You don't do this yet. 5. SVGs

eknkc 11y ago

GitLab is confusing. I mean, there is gitlab.com, there is ee, weird multi user licenses, community edition, githost etc. you need to simplify entry.

sytse 11y ago
Our 4 products offerings are explained on our homepage and https://about.gitlab.com/about/ https://about.gitlab.com/about/ Please let me know how we can improve the explanation. Multi user licenses are common in the industry but I don't like them either so we're switching to subscriptions you can buy per user before either GitLab 8.5 or 8.6.

trendnet 11y ago

Do you have any plans to provide some lightweight project management options in GitLab? I don't even want anything complex. Maybe, just a Trello-Kanban-like view of Issues and a simple burn down chart. With CI and Git/VCS and code review features GitLab could become the only thing a small team should install to go independent.

sytse 11y ago
Thanks for asking. As detailed in https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#scope https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#scope we plan to add Huboard as a kanban board and there is currently a bounty for that https://github.com/huboard/huboard/issues/276 https://github.com/huboard/huboard/issues/276 A burndown chart is something we planned to do now that we have issue weights. I couldn't find the issue for it so I created on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13422 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13422
sytse 11y ago
Thanks for asking. As detailed in https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#scope https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#scope we plan to add Huboard as a kanban board and there is currently a bounty for that https://github.com/huboard/huboard/issues/276 https://github.com/huboard/huboard/issues/276 A burndown chart is something we planned to do now that we have issue weights. I couldn't find the issue for it so I created on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13422 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13422

Spivak 11y ago

Hello, I am currently very happy with my self-hosted GitLab instance for my personal projects. But I would love to have some of the EE features (both for my workflow and experience working with enterprise tools) and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is. However open source is very important to me so my question is do you think it would ever be possible to purchase a personal use EE instance without license keys, calling home, and under an open source license?

sytse 11y ago
Glad to hear you're happy with your self-hosted instance.We're working on single user subscriptions (before either 8.5 or 8.6), our license key doesn't call home and our license will stay proprietary but already allows for modification and publishing patches.
- fanf2 11y ago
  Allowing your customers to publish their patches is super cool :-)
  - sytse 11y ago
    Thanks, I think the super cool thing is that they actually do it: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/merge_requests?assignee_id=&author_id=&label_name=&milestone_title=&scope=all&sort=id_desc&state=all https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/merge_requests?assig...

wanderr 11y ago

I will probably set up an account soon and try it out for myself but just from looking a gitlab.com it's not entirely clear what difference there is between EE and gitlab.com hosting. Are all the features of EE available on the SAAS version? Why is there so much emphasis on the self hosted options, is that something you are seeing a lot of demand for? I'm finding it hard to come up with a good reason to want to take on the burden of maintaining a source control server when there are good cheap cloud options. Why is the gitlab.com option so cheap, even for corporations even if they pay for support? I understand you're still trying to gain market share more than be profitable right now but as a company paying nothing for the product certainly makes me feel like it might go away at any moment and even if we pay for support we may not receive the level of support that we need. As corporate users, maybe we're not gitlab's target audience right now but aside from those questions it seems like a nice alternative to github, especially with regards to the additional ability to have pull requests rebased before merge...

sytse 11y ago
GitLab.com is running GitLab EE. Not all features are available, for example you can't link it to an LDAP server since that requires admin credentials that only GitLab Inc team members have. Our self hosted option currently is more popular than our SaaS one. More than 100,000 organizations use it because they can't use a SaaS for legal, integration, technical and security reasons (want it behind VPN, integrate with other on-premises services, etc.). GitLab.com is free because we make enough money with GitLab EE to pay for it. For more context and to understand why we think this is sustainable please see https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/#why-gitlab-com-will-be-free-forever https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/#why-gitlab-com-will-be-...

acd 11y ago

Thanks for bringing us Gitlab its great and useful!

sytse 11y ago
You're very welcome!

NetOpWibby 11y ago

I've started using GitLab Omnibus on my own server and I friggin' love it. I've moved all of my GitHub projects over to GitLab and haven't been happier to know that if I want to change something, I can. That being said, I do have some questions. 1) Is there a way for me to make modifications to the front-end and still keep those changes when I upgrade? 2) What kind of server should I be using the fastest git pulls/pushes? Currently, my server is running on a 30GB SSD DO droplet with 1GB RAM.

sytse 11y ago
Glad to hear you love GitLab. 1. No, but after a discussion on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10931690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10931690 we did decide to merge the branded login page into CE. If you are looking for another front-end change please let me know. 2. Per our requirements https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/install/requirements.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/inst... I would advise 2GB of RAM.
- NetOpWibby 11y ago
  I'm a front-end developer and designer so I love tweaking things to my liking. There are links that don't look like links and padding issues in a few places. The ability to choose custom fonts from Brick.im would be great too. If nothing else, I'll make the changes and figure out how to write a script that brings my changes back after I update/upgrade. Thanks for the requirements link, I must've missed that.
  - sytse 11y ago
    Certainly there is a lot of room for improving links and padding. Have you considered contributing them to GitLab? To get started see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-development-kit https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-development-kit Having people pick custom fonts might make it hard to get the design right for everyone. Reapplying changes in Omnibus is hard since it is shipped without a git repo, so you can't use git stash or git merge. You would need to switch to an installation from source but we don't recommend that. I really hope you can contribute the changes you would like to see, GitLab's frontend can still use a lot of polish.

kmch 11y ago

I know this isn't good feedback and I'm sorry for it, but when I tried using GitLab for a group project in school I had some trouble adding everybody to the repository and then letting them pull through the GitHub client. In the end I had to switch to using GitHub for that project, because the others got impatient and it was hard to even convince them of using git at all. Maybe it's just me, but it'd be nice if you could make that experience easier and would maybe offer a client of your own with really basic features for not-so-technical people to use.

sytse 11y ago
I'm sorry to hear that. Why was it hard adding people to the repository?