21 ms·

Moving to GitLab: Yes, it's worth it

292 points by brodock 10y ago

swehner 10y ago
Happy with gitolite. It's just fine, no need for a web interface.
markwillis82 10y ago
We are in the middle of migrating from Bitbucket to our self hosted CE version and apart from a few permissions issues on SSH keys we have had no issues with the whole process and updating our deployment system was just a case of changing git urls. Well done Gitlab :)
- jobvandervoort 10y ago
  Thanks Mark!
jsingleton 10y ago
I've moved from BitBucket to GitLab and on the whole it works well. I still use GitHub for open source projects though. One problem is that a lot of things automatically work with BitBucket and GitHub but GitLab need manual setup. For example, TeamCity has out-of-the-box support for both BitBucket and GitHub but you have to set up GitLab as a raw git repository (and create a user for it etc.). edit: I should add that I've also used GitHub professionally with private repositories. However, I quite like having separate credentials for open source vs. more sensitive work.
- jobvandervoort 10y ago
  Is there anything we can do from our side? We're very interested in making it easier to integrate with GitLab, but also happy to invest some time into making existing integrations easier to set up. Our hope is that with time, it'll become obvious that when developing an application, you integrate with GitLab as well as with BB and GH.
  - sdesol 10y ago
    > Is there anything we can do from our side Addressing this issue will go a long way, in making it easier for others to create solutions that can easily integrate with GitLab. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20567 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20567
    - jobvandervoort 10y ago
      Great, thanks. For the upcoming release (8.11, August 22nd), we're adding deploy keys with push permissions [0]. This would allow you to basically do the same thing. That said, that doesn't make it very clear that you can use these for this purpose, so I've added a note to re-evaluate these. We're also expanding OAuth scopes, potentially making it easier / more attractive to integrate [1]. [0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/1376 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/1376 [1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20492 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20492
      - sdesol 10y ago
        Since I have your attention, something else that I think should be on your radar is creating/defining supported injection points in GitLab's UI. If you haven't done so, you should look at what Microsoft has done with Visual Studio Team Services. By providing supported injection points in GitLab's UI, GitLab will be able to signal to others, that they are a solution you can safely build on top of.
        jobvandervoort 10y ago
        That's a very interesting idea. Right now, to integrate deeply, you'd have to go through the heavy-handed process of creating a service [0]. That then does allow you to do almost anything, but the barrier to entry for that is high. I created an issue for your proposal and hope you can provide some more feedback on how this would work, ideally [1]. [0]: http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/project_services/project_services.html#sts=Project http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/project_services/project_services.... Services [1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20667 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20667
jobvandervoort 10y ago
As always, we're happy to answer any questions about GitLab.
- pyther24 10y ago
  Why doesn't LFS support SSH authentication? It has been requested numerous times and has missed numerous milestones. I'm still not convinced it will hit 8.11. We desperately need LFS support, but we use one time tokens, so LFS Authentication over HTTPS just won't work for us. We are an EE customer and this future is way more useful than a UI redesign! https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3589 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3589
  - jobvandervoort 10y ago
    We're planning to do this as soon as possible. I agree that it has taken a long time. We simply did not have the capacity with the people that are able to work on this, to build it earlier. We now have strengthened the team that works on these issues. I'm seeing whether it's possible to ship this with 8.12 (due Sept 22nd).
  - woodcut 10y ago
    Git-LFS is a github project, you'd be better off asking them. But yeah I share your exp. without SSH and with all its numerous bugs LFS is one of the worst pieces of software i've come across. We switched to using rsync for binaries/ large files etc.
- mikro2nd 10y ago
  Any ideas of supporting Mercurial, too?
  - jobvandervoort 10y ago
    We're not planning to support Mercurial in the near future.
  - marcinkuzminski 10y ago
insanebits 10y ago
I'm recently setup Gitlab for my personal projects, import from bitbucket was a breeze. I've used omnibus installer and it was almost painless, only a couple of issues because of LXC limits. My only concern is resource usage, it does take at least 2Gb memory, are there any options to tweak it?
- jobvandervoort 10y ago
  We do recommend you allocate resources generously, with 2Gb minimum. That said, there are ways to tweak it. I believe you can reduce the default amount of Unicorn workers to one, as a start. Further than that I'm out of my league; I'll ask one of our awesome service engineers to respond here.
  - zegerjan 10y ago
    Also, please lower the default number of unicorn workers from 3 to 2.
OliverJones 10y ago
Working for a 15-year old small software company, I converted a whole bunch of ancient CVS stuff (yeah, yeah, don't laugh unless you also have 15 years of profitability) to GitLab CE. After a couple of false starts it went flawlessly and now works flawlessly. (I used the tigris.org migration tools). The GitLab team is doing a great job. Thanks you guys.
- jobvandervoort 10y ago
  Thanks Oliver, that's great to hear. Any way we can prevent those false starts for other people?
  - OliverJones 10y ago
    The false starts in our conversion were mostly struggles with how to restructure our old CVS repos so they made sense in the world of git. A few of them had to do with capturing some oddball CVS specific revision and branching history. None of the false starts were due to flaws or confusion in GitLab specifically. I should, and if you pester me I will, sanitize our internal how-to documents and scripts and contribute them to the Gitlab community so the next guy can benefit from our experience.
    - jobvandervoort 10y ago
      Pesters! It would be great to receive some contributions to our documentation. It has proven a big challenge to make sure it covers everything and stays up to date. We'd really appreciate it.
- pjc50 10y ago
  How about 20+ years of operational history from SCCS: http://fanf.livejournal.com/132656.html http://fanf.livejournal.com/132656.html
- SatvikBeri 10y ago
  One of the most successful companies I worked at had no version control or unit tests whatsoever. The code was all maintained by one person (the company relied heavily on custom software internally but it wasn't their product), who was able to keep the codebase small enough to basically hold in his head the whole time despite generating millions of dollars of value. That's certainly not how I would write code today, but it is amazing to see how much top-notch programmers vary.
_pmf_ 10y ago
They can argue rationally all they like; GitHub is the Oracle of VC hosting ... nobody will get fired for choosing GitHub.
- pluma 10y ago
  So far every early stage startup I've seen was using GitLab unless they only have open source / public projects and can use GitHub for free or need GitHub because of the community (it's still easier to get traction on GH as an open source project because so many developers already have a GH account). GitLab has seen steady growth for years and has recently been gaining an increasing level of attention (in part because of the pricing changes and dodgy politics at GitHub). It's here to stay. I hope GitLab.com will become more performant and stable. I would love to see GitHub for open source be replaced with a company actually built around open source rather than proprietary tech and catchy marketing.
hochchristoph 10y ago
Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12224723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12224723
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hochchristoph 10y ago
Gitlab users: How many hours per year do you spend on doing maintenance for your setup? (servers, updating, backups, troubleshooting, etc.)
- chewmieser 10y ago
  I login to my server once a week and run a yum update. Backups are scheduled, so I don't have to concern myself with that. No troubleshooting. But we're a small (<10 developers across 4 repos with access granted to ~ 30 people to GitLab for ticketing) team. Even my non-technical people are able to use GitLab for ticketing without bugging me, so that's fantastic. Love it.
- icebraining 10y ago
  Spent 30m installing it and configuring SSL. Nowadays I spend a couple of minutes monthly doing "aptitude update && aptitude install gitlab-ce" (after 5-15m reading about the new release, to see if it's worth it / problem free). We never had an issue with the auto-upgrade. It comes with support for automatic offsite backups (we use S3), so besides occasionally restoring to make sure they're working, that takes no time at all.
- timmipetit 10y ago
  0 hours, we pay for the hosted option via https://githost.io/ https://githost.io/
- pluma 10y ago
  I'm using paid GitLab hosting via the GitLab-owned GitHost.io, so zero: everytime an update comes out I get two e-mails and that's it. The pricing is extremely competitive. We are a small shop so the smallest package ($35, recommended for up to 30 active users) is good enough. We started with a self-hosted GitLab via docker and switched to GitHost as soon as it was bought by GitLab.
- zegerjan 10y ago
  If you don't want to maintain GitLab, either CE or EE, but would like to use it, you might want to take a look at GitHost.io The instance I maintain takes me about 15 minutes a month. Security updates are done automatically so all I've got left to do it 'apt-get install gitlab-ce' once or twice a month and thats it!
hudell 10y ago
I recently moved my personal project from GitHub to GitLab and the whole process took me less than a minute, with a simple git remote set-url on the client side. The future is amazing.
- jobvandervoort 10y ago
  That's great to hear. Would love to hear your feedback.
  - hudell 10y ago
    Sure! The only reason I wasn't using GitLab before is that I had a writer working remotely on my game and I didn't know how to explain to her how to use it. So I had moved everything to GitHub and told her to use their desktop app, which makes the clone/commit/push/pull flow amazingly simple.
- kh_hk 10y ago
  Not wanting to diminish what GitLab is doing, but what you mention is an inherent characteristic of git itself that applies the same way to GitHub, Bitbucket and a self hosted git bare repository. Any git host should expose a git interface for it to work as a git repository.
  - hudell 10y ago
    Yes, but they simplified it a lot. I just connected to github, chose the repository and clicked import. Maybe all of those services have it that way, but I'm just glad that GitLab had it.
    - kh_hk 10y ago
      That is a different case than configuring a different remote on config and pushing to another host which is what I interpreted reading your comment, my bad. Out of curiosity, does the import process include all issues, PR and comments?
lima 10y ago
Phabricator is a great alternative, by the way. Really stable and has the best code review interface / workflow I've ever used.
- ommunist 10y ago
  +1 for phabricator
- cookiesboxcar 10y ago
  I really want to love phabricator, but the local install for a new team is so painful... any thoughts about how to make that better?
  - collyw 10y ago
    Everyone is talking about installing these services. Don't they have a central hosted server like Gihub?
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    I have this problem too. It's not hard to set up, there are just so many tiny pieces that need to be run by hand that it's going to take a human well over an hour to read through the docs and get it right. Someone made a Saltstack state[1] that I've used and had some success with - installing and configuring Salt from zero and using this config is still faster than installing Phabricator by hand. [1]: https://github.com/bougie/salt-phabricator-formula https://github.com/bougie/salt-phabricator-formula
    - lima 10y ago
      It's actually much easier to setup and operate than GitLab with its massive dependencies. Also a lot faster.
      - Karunamon 10y ago
        Gitlab is unfortunately a pig, in the large and bloated sense of the term. Which is really sad! I love the app, it looks better than Phabricator and does so much more, but then I can throw Phabricator on the same droplet I use for plenty of other stuff with resources to spare for $5/month, where Gitlab would require a dedicated $10 instance just due to memory usage alone. Guess I'm just not the target audience :(
romanr 10y ago
What is the benefit of moving to Gitlab from Bitbucket (or Github) for private repos? Same feature set, Gitlab cost more per user and on top of all you have to run your own server? Am I missing something here?
- jobvandervoort 10y ago
  I'll leave the marketing talk to less biased people here, but do note that: - you can use GitLab.com for free: unlimited public and private repositories, unlimited collaborators, free hosting of your Docker images, free hosting of your static site with any static site generator and free CI / CD - GitLab CE is fully open source (MIT Expat). You can easily install it anywhere you want.
  - chrishacken 10y ago
    "you can use GitLab.com for free" It seems like that is the main selling point. However, I think that most of us don't want the extra weight of managing yet another tool. Thus why many of us use GitHub to begin with and not something else...
    - jobvandervoort 10y ago
      What do you mean with managing another tool? GitLab.com is our own instance, that we manage.
      - chrishacken 10y ago
        My fault, I didn't see that there was a free hosted version. I thought it was either free self-hosted or paid hosted.
    - corobo 10y ago
      Just to clarify GitLab.com is their hosted version, not the self-hosted option (Which is GitLab CE)
chrisan 10y ago
How about costs compared to Bitbucket? I appreciate what you guys are doing but I think Github is cashing in on their brand and for a while they had the best UX (they still might! but I no longer care anymore as all the competitors are "good enough" for me) which lets them set a high premium people will pay. However, I think it's unfair to leave out Bitbucket, they have come a long way. The first example of 8 developers and 20 repos is $10/month or 100 developers and 300 repos examples is $100/month What is the cost and/or time involved in maintaining DigitalOcean (or whatever VPS)? Security updates, upgrades, redundancy/availability, backups, or when something goes wrong the time involved in debugging/fixing (github/bitbucket have had their problems, is gitlab 100% available w/o hiccups)?
- icebraining 10y ago
  Very little time, in my experience. unattended-upgrades takes care of most security updates, a gitlab update is just "aptitude update && aptitude install gitlab-ce", and it automatically handles offsite backups.
- tiimo 10y ago
  If availability, security, backups etc. are highly critical for you and you don't want to host yourself, you could also have a look at our GitLab hosting service called GitHost (https://githost.io https://githost.io). It gives you your own private and secure GitLab instance on DigitalOcean which is completely maintained by us. GitHost for teams of up to 100 is $80/month.
- collyw 10y ago
  I find Githubs UI pretty poor.
hackerboos 10y ago
I've run Gitlab for about a year now and I think it's great. However it is sluggish on a 1GB box and I think you need at least 2GB. Since Linode doubled the RAM on their $10 boxes then you can get it for the same price.
- OliverJones 10y ago
  My gitlab-ce instance runs on a vm on an internal hypervisor machine. I just upped the RAM provisioning from 2gb to 4gb, and now it's plenty fast. One of the benefits of working for a software company that started in the pre-cloud era is a surplus of server boxes, now retrieved from colo racks. :-)
krautsourced 10y ago
I really liked Gitlab when last I tried it, but in the end I went with https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/ instead. For a small-ish team this felt like the most straight forward self-hosted solution. Still missing LFS though, which sucks, but it's being worked on.
- raiso-lo 10y ago
  We've been using https://rhodecode.com https://rhodecode.com for internal repositories: it is also open source, yet has better interface and out-of-the-box LFS support.
  - mc42 10y ago
    The native subversion and mercurial support for the same repos is incredibly attractive. Any idea how it converts them to a shared format in real-time?
    - raiso-lo 10y ago
      @mc42 They use a common layer called "VCS server". Here's how it looks like from the system architecture standpoint: https://docs.rhodecode.com/RhodeCode-Enterprise/admin/system-overview.html#system-architecture https://docs.rhodecode.com/RhodeCode-Enterprise/admin/system...
      - mc42 10y ago
        Thanks, that's really cool.
  - atomi 10y ago
    Does it have repo mirroring? One of my favorite features of Gogs is the ability to mirror a remote repository with automatic updates.
- reactor 10y ago
  Can't recommend gogs enough, slick/simple yet quite fast. Hassle free installation is a bonus.
technomancy 10y ago
I was pretty impressed with how easy it was to get free CI runs on pushes and merge requests with my OSS game: https://gitlab.com/technomancy/bussard/commit/73e84d11ed33fff42922841fb38df910b7ee00f1 https://gitlab.com/technomancy/bussard/commit/73e84d11ed33ff...
- daveguy 10y ago
  This made GitLab hosted repos well worth it for me over github or bitbucket: https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/ https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/
  - gitdude 10y ago
    We recently launched pipelines, it is in beta right now: https://bitbucket.org/product/features/pipelines https://bitbucket.org/product/features/pipelines
- jobvandervoort 10y ago
  We're working hard on making CI super easy to use and setup. If you want to give it a spin, check out our recent blog post on starting from 0: https://about.gitlab.com/2016/07/29/the-basics-of-gitlab-ci/ https://about.gitlab.com/2016/07/29/the-basics-of-gitlab-ci/
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    I was trying to look into Gitlab Runner the other day. How decoupled is it from Gitlab itself? Would I be able to somewhat easily write a completely different UI, with a different framework/language (say, Django), hook it all up to Github/Gogs and use Gitlab runner for the jobs themselves? Because if that's what it is, that is pretty kickass.
    - jobvandervoort 10y ago
      AFAIK you would not be able to do that. I've asked the author of Runner to comment here.
gnu8 10y ago
Earlier this week I had a family member get spooked by a web site with a fake blue screen tech support scam, the one where they tell you your computer has dire issues and you must pay them $300 to fix it. The page was taken down as of yesterday, but what is Gitlab doing to address this type of abuse in general?
- coldpie 10y ago
  You seem to have left out some context. What does this have to do with Gitlab?
  - gnu8 10y ago
    Hosted by Gitlab.
    - sytse 10y ago
      If someone is abusing GitLab please use the 'i' on the user profile to report them.
ksec 10y ago
Small nit pick, why DO and not Linode? Faster CPU, more RAM and Bandwidth, cheaper as well.
- ksec 10y ago
  Not sure why the downvote, the article keeps bagging about saving cost, when Linode would have been a much better fit and cheaper. This isn't another ads or trolls. It is similar to AWS topic and recommending GCP, or Microsft Azure, all three are classed as similar with different tradeoff. So is Linode and DO. I do not think there are any other VPS provider then are in their class mindset wise.
merb 10y ago
We moved from BitBucket on premise to GitLab CE on premise. Actually most things now just works. Updating is a breeze. Instead of downloading a installer and copying / fixing server.xml we can just do a apt update && apt upgrade -y. Some things are a little bit akward but BitBucket didn't had this, too: - FF only merges is only EE (too bad that would be a really major selling point even for CE, squash button would be unnecessary) - CI is a little limited compared to a full blown Jenkins - We hit a CI bug which still shows up "Running" Pipelines https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/19455 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/19455 - Artifacts API is limited to everything or nothing - CI Stages can be defined as trigger only but you can't have multiple triggers that starting different things (considering a production trigger and a testing trigger while you don't want the 'manual' thing directly in GitLab, especially when integrating into other systems makes this a flaw) - No Custom CSS (yeah our logo isn't 72px x 72px...) But then again BitBucket didn't had these things anyway so except the bug it's nothing that would've hold us back. Everytime you wanted a Feature for BitBucket, the guys said that there is/was an extension. How dare that costed a shitload of money which would even superseeded GitLab EE.
- jobvandervoort 10y ago
  Thank you for the awesome detailed feedback. Responded point by point below: > FF only merges is only EE (too bad that would be a really major selling point even for CE, squash button would be unnecessary) These are always hard choices to make for us. We wrote about these decisions here [0]. > CI is a little limited compared to a full blown Jenkins - We hit a CI bug which still shows up "Running" Pipelines We're still young, but confident that we'll get there! CI/CD is a major focus for us and we're working really hard to improve it with every release. Love to get specific feature requests for things that we miss in comparison with Jenkins. Regarding the bug: I've pinged our PM on it. > Artifacts API is limited to everything or nothing Could you elaborate? I know we have numerous improvements planned, but I'm not sure about their prioritization. > CI Stages can be defined as trigger only but you can't have multiple triggers that starting different things (considering a production trigger and a testing trigger while you don't want the 'manual' thing directly in GitLab, especially when integrating into other systems makes this a flaw) Hm, could you write a feature proposal for this [1]? It sounds like a great improvement. > No Custom CSS (yeah our logo isn't 72px x 72px...) We're extremely hesitant to do this, as we make many changes between releases. This would break custom css with every upgrade, in turn resulting in a worse experience. I rather hear suggestions about specific parts in the interface that should be made customizable or suggestions about changes to the UI altogether. Although I'm not a fan of custom css, there is an issue to discuss this and I welcome your input there [2]. [0]: https://about.gitlab.com/2016/01/11/being-a-good-open-source-steward/ https://about.gitlab.com/2016/01/11/being-a-good-open-source... [1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/new https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/new [2]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/15635 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/15635
oDot 10y ago
I'm working on a proper Docker setup for GitLab development which I think can be made production-ready pretty easily after the development version works. It's hard separating the different moving parts (gitlab, gitlab-workhorse, gitlab-shell+ssh, postgres/mysql, redis) but I think I will have a merge request ready soon enough :D
- jobvandervoort 10y ago
  Wow, this sounds great! Do you have anything to share? Do you leverage GDK? [0] [0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-development-kit https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-development-kit
  - oDot 10y ago
    Not right now. I'm following the install from source guide so it'll be as close as possible to production. I'll change some things the omnibus package does better, then apply the GDK stuff so people could use it for development. I have some code. I guess I can submit a merge request + issue on gitlab-ce and gitlab-workhorse, but I need to read CONTRIBUTING and PROCESS first :P
atsaloli 10y ago
I love how responsive our local (departmental) instance of GitLab CE is -- it's downright snappy compared to the corporate instance of JIRA. We love the issue tracking subsystem of GitLab and use it as our main ticketing system. We've done a few talks on Git basics to help increase adoption, and are doing a free webinar "Git Foundations: Basic Concepts and Definitions" next week: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/git-foundations-basic-concepts-and-definitions-tickets-26937970194 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/git-foundations-basic-concepts-... This is the sort of result it makes us very happy to achieve: "I have got by on minimum understanding of Git for a couple of years now--this really brought up my confidence in using Git. After I learned the Git internals, the esoteric commands really started falling into place." --Nicholas Santucci, Monitoring and Performance Engineer
- jobvandervoort 10y ago
  That's some great feedback, thanks! Any feature requests for Issues? If you plan on doing physical events, drop me an email (job at gitlab).
  - atsaloli 10y ago
    We've done three physical events already. :-) I'll email you! Our next physical event will be teaching at Ohio Linux Fest (https://ohiolinux.org/olfi/ https://ohiolinux.org/olfi/)
  - cdawzrd 10y ago
    Feature requests for Issues: priorities, and states other than open and closed. These are the biggest things keeping us from using GitLab issues rather than an external tool. We need to be able to set priorities (ideally customizable, but at minimum high/med/low). We can kind of do that through labels, but it's messy because you can only search for one label at a time (no boolean combinations of labels). Right now, when you assign an issue to a user, it's considered "in progress", and from there it can either be unassigned or closed. It would be nice to separate the state of the issue from the assigned user, since in our current workflow we assign many issues to a user, but that user might only be working on a few of them at a time. Using our current bug tracker, we can differentiate between "Open, unassigned", "Open, assigned", "Open, in progress", "Fixed", "Verified", "Closed", etc. I know having a completely customizable state diagram for issues is a big software task, but maybe there is some intermediary level of complexity that would allow better tracking of what is actually being worked on now vs. what is assigned to people.
igtztorrero 10y ago
If your concern is cost, bitbucket always have free private repositories. If your looking for privacy and protect your sacred code, install gitlab on one of your server or vps. Thats what we do at SAIT
- cm3 10y ago
  Fair point, but it's important not to fool ourselves in terms of data safety or at least specify what we mean when we say "it's private on your vps". If your code is private and not meant to fall into external hands, then putting it on a VPS won't protect it. The only way is to put it on a machine that's only used from workstations that access it in a local-only fashion, inside containers/vms that have no way to contact the outside world. This means the build process may not access the internet and has to rely on a cache of external libs if needed and allowed. This also implies that network config won't allow access as forbidden via VLANs or similar measures. If someone wants to steal your code, grabbing it from your vps won't be harder than doing the same on github/gitlab because the procedures to get access will be very similar. I suspect by private code you mean code which shouldn't be publicly clone'able but isn't behind locked doors otherwise.
thinkMOAR 10y ago
I would like to see that there is just one gitlab version, and that the enterprise features are simply available in the community edition too. I will not pay just for a feature like repo mirroring, but it's i think a feature many people will use and or utilise when moving, migrating to a gitlab setup. But it is the one and only feature i am missing so not worth upgrading to EE for me. As soon as an alternative (open source, self hosted, free) comes around that does have this built-in, i will be tempted to try it. (and of course on success i will move away from gitlab). But for now, gitlab (CE) works best for me, self hosted.
- jobvandervoort 10y ago
  We do our best to make CE and EE excellent, where the features that land in EE are mostly interesting for larger teams. For every feature that we don't bring to CE, this is always a hard decision. We wrote about this here: https://about.gitlab.com/2016/01/11/being-a-good-open-source-steward/ https://about.gitlab.com/2016/01/11/being-a-good-open-source...
  - throwanem 10y ago
    I'd love to see an a la carte licensing option, where an organization could start with stock CE and license just the features they need. I realize that'd be a bear to implement, though.
  - thinkMOAR 10y ago
    Hoi Job :) mogguh I understand, and money has to be made too. It's a nasty trade off. Though as i wrote to the other reply, its the service that is worth the money not necessarily the feature(s). IMHO, there is always a certain percentage of users that want to pay. The more users in total, the larger the amount of paying customers. And the repo mirroring would be a great feature to let me move a lot of github project users to gitlab without losing any potential updates from an upstream source. It would also allow for nice backup purposes, though you could do that now of course already with the hosted enterprise solution. But if the feature was in CE, many would be used, familiarised, to the feature, and perhaps see the added value of a backup node ($$) at gitlab.
crossman 10y ago
FWIW, I recently transferred my side project from bitbucket to gitlab and I'm really happy with it. The issue tracker is significantly better, and the built in CI seems great but I haven't started using it yet since I already have codeship going.
- btcmike 10y ago
  I did the same last month and then transferred back to bitbucket. The response time on gitlab.com was painfully slow. That extra 2-3 seconds waits for each commit was enough to drive me back. I still use github for professional projects and bitbucket for personal ones.
  - jobvandervoort 10y ago
    I can imagine that GitLab.com was too slow. We just (two days ago) added another storage, where new repositories are created. That should be faster. I hope you're willing to give GitLab another try when we've improved the performance of GitLab.com or by hosting it yourself. Follow our work on GitLab.com performance here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/59 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/59
  - bovermyer 10y ago
    I had the same experience. The other thing I would add is that the social side of Gitlab is not as refined as GitHub's. There's no "timeline," for example. I pay for GitHub and enjoy it.
    - 0x0 10y ago
      On the other hand, gitlab's "network" view of commit branches is excellent and I've never been able to find anything remotely similar on Github. Essential to manage development in multiple concurrent branches.
      - __david__ 10y ago
        Isn't that just gitk[1] or tig[2] (my favorite)? [1] comes with git, screenshot: http://static.lwn.net/images/ns/kernel/gitk.png http://static.lwn.net/images/ns/kernel/gitk.png [2] http://jonas.nitro.dk/tig/ http://jonas.nitro.dk/tig/
spriggan3 10y ago
Does Github has a on premise offer like Bitbucket or Gitlab ?
- dthakur 10y ago
  Github Enterprise.
- moby 10y ago
  Indeed we do. GitHub Enterprise 2.7 was just released yesterday: https://enterprise.github.com/home https://enterprise.github.com/home
AWildDHHAppears 10y ago
Interesting. For projects that don't need a "community" we've been using Amazon CodeCommit. We don't like to use Github anymore because of the politics there. Example: We had a project involving software filters that included this sentence in the description: > Phase is related to time, but a pure time delay does not involve any phase shift. A pure time delay or "group delay" is constant with frequency. Phase shift varies with frequency and can advance or retard as the frequency changes. We got a note from a woman who works at github who was apparently scanning open source projects for "offensive" words. Our project was flagged for the use of the word "retard". We removed our project and never used github again.
- theli0nheart 10y ago
  Wow, that is absurd. Did you ever follow up with the employee who sent you a note? What did flagging entail? I.e., were you not able to use the repo?
  - AWildDHHAppears 10y ago
    Yes. She indicated that it doesn't matter how the word is used, some will see it as aggressive. As she appeared to be a non-technical person mysteriously employed by GitHub as some consolation to some organization (IIRC it was called the "Ada Initiative") I realized that github is no longer a technology company. It's a Social Justice company. Good luck to them--I don't even disagree with the basic premise--but I like my git repo companies to be worried about git.
    - hrayr 10y ago
      Some of the commenters here assumed that the message was automated, you're making it abundantly clear thats was not the case. In fact she defended her position. Did you try to escalate it? This is absurd.
- matthewmacleod 10y ago
  We removed our project and never used github again. That seems like a totally disproportionate approach versus responding with a polite 'this is a legitimate use of the word, thanks' message.
matthewmacleod 10y ago
GitLab is great and it's lovely to see a diverse selection of tools, but I'm not too convinced of the cost benefits – for a team with 100 developers, the annual cost of ~$11,000 is a pretty small amount compared to the maybe $25m salaries you'll be paying!
- danielrmay 10y ago
  Avg salary of $250k per dev? Are you hiring?
  - dr_zoidberg 10y ago
    Well where I live, the final salary you get in your pocket is about 60% of what the employer has to pay (the rest are taxes and "social charges" which include medical insurance and retirement funds). If it's the same where OP lives, then he was probably thinking about 125k salarys + taxes, charges, etc. Also, he must be considering other expenses that come with having employees (though he did say "25m in salaries"). Still, if you bring the salaries to 100k a year, it still compares favorably to GitLab: $11k vs 10M.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    You of course realize that "salary seen by the employee" is not at all the same as "costs payed by the employer". (For example, social security and health insurance).
  - matthewmacleod 10y ago
    I would guess fully-loaded cost is 2x salary, so perhaps I should have said "amount you'll be paying for staff" :)
- akerro 10y ago
  Could you take a look at price for GitHub for same big team please?
  - matthewmacleod 10y ago
tomjen3 10y ago
Gitlab is pretty awesome, especially because they let you have unlimited private repositories on their website. So far my biggest annoyance is that when you click on a project you don't get a list of files (like you do on github) but just the projects readme, and even then only if you remembered to capitalize it.
- connorshea 10y ago
  In Settings you can set the "Project view" to Files view and it'll give you what you're looking for :) https://gitlab.com/profile/preferences https://gitlab.com/profile/preferences
mrmondo 10y ago
As I always say on every GitLab post on HN (and no I'm not paid to nor do I have any affiliation with the company) - we switched from a combination of Github + Gitolite/Gitosis to GitLab not long after it was release and my god it's damn good, It's really impressed us particularly in the last 12 months how rapidly they're developing the product and getting new released / fixed / features out. Especially like Gitlab CI w/ Docker.
- jobvandervoort 10y ago
  Thanks, always great to see you here!
dijit 10y ago
I posted before[0] about why I moved to gitlab; I'm using a self-hosted instance and the only real complaint I have is resource consumption. But if you bite the bullet a bit it's a really great product. The other thing would be "ease of deployment" or lack thereof- if you're going for anything other than omnibus installs or docker images then it can be a bit painful. (I wanted to run on freebsd for example). But, yes, it's super nice to have something not only comparable to github but even superior in some areas. I would definitely run the enterprise edition if that were my decision at work. [0]: https://libsecure.so/t/github-alternative-aka-weve-moved-git-drk-sc/203 https://libsecure.so/t/github-alternative-aka-weve-moved-git...
- tedmiston 10y ago
  Similar view for myself; though the resource consumption is such a minor complaint that I don't even really consider it relative to all of the benefits GitLab provides.
- haynes 10y ago
  How has your experience of installing gitlab on freebsd been? Anything in particular that can be improved? I'm pretty sure the gitlab team is open for all kind of improvements. :)
  - dijit 10y ago
    Someone wrote a very nice and detailed guide, however upgrading isn't mentioned[0] it also suggests operating under bad practices like running gitlab from /home/ I guess I could write a decent salt-formula to do all this, but I can't handle upgrading of gitlab easily, it always breaks when I take a new branch from git and run a gitlab-ctl reconfigure. [0]: https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlab-recipes/blob/master/install/freebsd/freebsd-10.md https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlab-recipes/blob/master/insta...
    - hs86 10y ago
      The pkg-message of the Gitlab port has some useful links to more documentation. https://www.freshports.org/www/gitlab/ https://www.freshports.org/www/gitlab/ https://github.com/t-zuehlsdorff/gitlabhq/blob/master/doc/install/installation-freebsd.md https://github.com/t-zuehlsdorff/gitlabhq/blob/master/doc/in... https://github.com/t-zuehlsdorff/gitlabhq/blob/master/doc/update/freebsd_patch_versions.md https://github.com/t-zuehlsdorff/gitlabhq/blob/master/doc/up... https://github.com/t-zuehlsdorff/gitlabhq/blob/master/doc/update/8.6-to-8.7-freebsd.md https://github.com/t-zuehlsdorff/gitlabhq/blob/master/doc/up...
senthil_rajasek 10y ago
"Phase shift varies with frequency and can advance or retard as the frequency changes" I looked up Webster's American English Thesaurus and the antonym for 'advance' in the sense that it's used in your sentence is recede. Here is the same sentence rewritten using recede. "Phase shift varies with frequency and can advance or recede as the frequency changes." This is an easy case where you could have used correct language. If you would like to know why it's offensive to some people, I could educate you.
- assface 10y ago
  > If you would like to know why it's offensive to some people, I could educate you. Please do. https://i.imgur.com/jElyDnl.jpg https://i.imgur.com/jElyDnl.jpg
- justinpombrio 10y ago
  "retard" is also a correct word to use here; it means "to delay". > If you would like to know why it's offensive to some people, I could educate you. Could you educate us as to why it's offensive in this context? I think we all know why calling a mentally handicapped person "retarded" offends some people, but no one did so.
  - senthil_rajasek 10y ago
    Since you asked, Words are powerful and stir up emotions. In this context, someone stigmatized as "slow" or "dumb" by society, reading a sentence with the word "retard" in it has to deal with bad memories from the past rather than understanding the concepts in this sentence. Clearly, an alternative word choice exists. That's one reason why it's offensive.
    - zeveb 10y ago
      > Words are powerful and stir up emotions. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Yes, words do stir up emotions, but well-adjusted adults learn as children to control and channel their emotions in healthy, constructive ways, rather than permitting themselves to be debilitated by seeing a perfectly correct word used perfectly correctly — and inoffensively. > In this context, someone stigmatized as "slow" or "dumb" by society, reading a sentence with the word "retard" in it has to deal with bad memories from the past rather than understanding the concepts in this sentence. Someone so emotionally fragile would be offended even by reading your sentence about the original sentence!
matt4077 10y ago
I tried their free tier and it was just extremely slow. A small project where commits usually took 5 seconds now needed >1min for any operation. Moved it all into the google cloud and it works at the speed of the network. But we don't really need any of the features except the git repository anyway.
- connorshea 10y ago
  Free tier as in self-hosted GitLab CE or GitLab.com? Self-hosted might be slow if you don't have enough RAM on the system you're running it with, but as long as you have more than 2GB it definitely shouldn't take more than 1 minute for a basic operation. As for GitLab.com, that can be slow (we're working on improving it, much better now than it was last year, but still progress to be made!), but it should never take more than a minute, otherwise it'd just timeout. When did you try it out?
zthall 10y ago
If GitLab's issues allow you to mark as unread or flag it in any way to come back to it, then I'm sold. I can't believe this still isn't a Github feature. I don't know how many times I've lost track of issues or forgotten because I can't flag them.
- connorshea 10y ago
  You'll be very happy to hear about Todos[1] then! You can add a todo or mark it as done from the sidebar on any issue or merge request. It'll stay in your Todo list until you mark it as done or comment on the issue/MR. We'll be waiting for you at https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in :P [1]: http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/todos.html http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/todos.html
gravypod 10y ago
The idea of switching from one company that holds your data to another doesn't make sense to me. What does make sense and is worth working for is being able to host my own code on my network. That's where GitLab really comes in for my work. I have no reason to switch from one platform to another if I can't host it in my own network. GitLab was a great idea but from my experience it's been built on an extremely frustrating method of deployment. I'm not a dev ops person nor do I want to be. I want things to be as simple as "run this and it will work" without me needing to do much of anything. I tried to setup a GitLabs instance but after running a simple update command (apt-get update && apt-get upgrade) it broke. It seemed to have something to do with something called Sidekick at the time or something along those lines. It was just frustrating that the automated update scripts from their deb BROKE their own system. That just should never be a possibility in a system, I have near no tolerance for dealing with crap like that. After messing around with it for a while I gave up and tried Gogs. It was easier to use but using go's build tools yielded similar problem for me. It's not the easiest thing to setup and takes a bit of know how to get Gogs and golang's build tools working (I know someone is going to tell me I'm wrong and that this did not happen to me). I settled on GitBucket [1] and I have to say I'll not be switching to anything else. It was simple: download and run a single jar file. I setup an unprivileged user, it's own opt folder, and a small init.d script to do everything I needed. To update I download the latest version and I do a drop in replacement with the .jar. Nothing difficult. (Sadly GitHub seems to have put legal pressure on them to change their 'look' so they've done that but before that it was perfectly stable in appearance unlike GitLabs). If anyone is interested in the self-hosting aspect of this, I'd say don't look at GitLabs, Gogs, or any of the other systems out there. Look at GitBucket. [1] - https://gitbucket.github.io/ https://gitbucket.github.io/
- dijit 10y ago
  I'm surprised you're not running the docker instance, it's literally "run this and it will work" in fact, most of their instructions are rather on the nose.
  - gravypod 10y ago
    Getting docker working for me has always been a pain. I've still not gotten as docker install working across updates or dist-upgrades. Again, I'm as much of a sysadmin/debops is a neurologist in the way that I'm in no way a neurologist. If I cut open someones head, maybe messed around with some things, and closed it up they might be ok. That's how my servers 'run'. Anything outside securing the system (ssh key auth, non-root user, etc) to a standard good enough for me is not doable.
EugeneOZ 10y ago
Their UI is too slow (as many other Ruby web apps).
- sytse 10y ago
  If you're talking about GitLab.com, this is due to other issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/59 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/59 If you're talking about a self hosted instance, we think it is OK right now and frontend code will get better now that we adopted https://vuejs.org/ https://vuejs.org/
jgalt212 10y ago
Dumb question: For self hosting, what's wrong with a shared file server and nice GUI such as TortoiseHG? There seem to be a bunch of Git GUIs as well: https://git-scm.com/download/gui/linux https://git-scm.com/download/gui/linux
collinmanderson 10y ago
> GitLab really started accelerating in 2015 as this commit graph shows They're using a Github commit graph to show how good Gitlab is? GitLab's graphs aren't as nice? :)
educar 10y ago
We are a company of 10 on GitLab CE (We selfhost via the Cloudron). Costs us ~60 a month, so it's already cheap for us. We also have a bunch of other apps on it which saves us more money.

292 points by brodock 10y ago

Happy with gitolite. It's just fine, no need for a web interface.

We are in the middle of migrating from Bitbucket to our self hosted CE version and apart from a few permissions issues on SSH keys we have had no issues with the whole process and updating our deployment system was just a case of changing git urls. Well done Gitlab :)

jobvandervoort 10y ago
Thanks Mark!

jsingleton 10y ago

I've moved from BitBucket to GitLab and on the whole it works well. I still use GitHub for open source projects though. One problem is that a lot of things automatically work with BitBucket and GitHub but GitLab need manual setup. For example, TeamCity has out-of-the-box support for both BitBucket and GitHub but you have to set up GitLab as a raw git repository (and create a user for it etc.). edit: I should add that I've also used GitHub professionally with private repositories. However, I quite like having separate credentials for open source vs. more sensitive work.

jobvandervoort 10y ago
Is there anything we can do from our side? We're very interested in making it easier to integrate with GitLab, but also happy to invest some time into making existing integrations easier to set up. Our hope is that with time, it'll become obvious that when developing an application, you integrate with GitLab as well as with BB and GH.
- sdesol 10y ago
  > Is there anything we can do from our side Addressing this issue will go a long way, in making it easier for others to create solutions that can easily integrate with GitLab. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20567 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20567
  - jobvandervoort 10y ago
    Great, thanks. For the upcoming release (8.11, August 22nd), we're adding deploy keys with push permissions [0]. This would allow you to basically do the same thing. That said, that doesn't make it very clear that you can use these for this purpose, so I've added a note to re-evaluate these. We're also expanding OAuth scopes, potentially making it easier / more attractive to integrate [1]. [0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/1376 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/1376 [1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20492 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20492
    - sdesol 10y ago
      Since I have your attention, something else that I think should be on your radar is creating/defining supported injection points in GitLab's UI. If you haven't done so, you should look at what Microsoft has done with Visual Studio Team Services. By providing supported injection points in GitLab's UI, GitLab will be able to signal to others, that they are a solution you can safely build on top of.
      - jobvandervoort 10y ago
        That's a very interesting idea. Right now, to integrate deeply, you'd have to go through the heavy-handed process of creating a service [0]. That then does allow you to do almost anything, but the barrier to entry for that is high. I created an issue for your proposal and hope you can provide some more feedback on how this would work, ideally [1]. [0]: http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/project_services/project_services.html#sts=Project http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/project_services/project_services.... Services [1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20667 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20667

jobvandervoort 10y ago

As always, we're happy to answer any questions about GitLab.

pyther24 10y ago
Why doesn't LFS support SSH authentication? It has been requested numerous times and has missed numerous milestones. I'm still not convinced it will hit 8.11. We desperately need LFS support, but we use one time tokens, so LFS Authentication over HTTPS just won't work for us. We are an EE customer and this future is way more useful than a UI redesign! https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3589 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3589
- jobvandervoort 10y ago
  We're planning to do this as soon as possible. I agree that it has taken a long time. We simply did not have the capacity with the people that are able to work on this, to build it earlier. We now have strengthened the team that works on these issues. I'm seeing whether it's possible to ship this with 8.12 (due Sept 22nd).
- woodcut 10y ago
  Git-LFS is a github project, you'd be better off asking them. But yeah I share your exp. without SSH and with all its numerous bugs LFS is one of the worst pieces of software i've come across. We switched to using rsync for binaries/ large files etc.
mikro2nd 10y ago
Any ideas of supporting Mercurial, too?
- jobvandervoort 10y ago
  We're not planning to support Mercurial in the near future.
- marcinkuzminski 10y ago

insanebits 10y ago

I'm recently setup Gitlab for my personal projects, import from bitbucket was a breeze. I've used omnibus installer and it was almost painless, only a couple of issues because of LXC limits. My only concern is resource usage, it does take at least 2Gb memory, are there any options to tweak it?

jobvandervoort 10y ago
We do recommend you allocate resources generously, with 2Gb minimum. That said, there are ways to tweak it. I believe you can reduce the default amount of Unicorn workers to one, as a start. Further than that I'm out of my league; I'll ask one of our awesome service engineers to respond here.
- zegerjan 10y ago
  Also, please lower the default number of unicorn workers from 3 to 2.

OliverJones 10y ago

Working for a 15-year old small software company, I converted a whole bunch of ancient CVS stuff (yeah, yeah, don't laugh unless you also have 15 years of profitability) to GitLab CE. After a couple of false starts it went flawlessly and now works flawlessly. (I used the tigris.org migration tools). The GitLab team is doing a great job. Thanks you guys.

jobvandervoort 10y ago
Thanks Oliver, that's great to hear. Any way we can prevent those false starts for other people?
- OliverJones 10y ago
  The false starts in our conversion were mostly struggles with how to restructure our old CVS repos so they made sense in the world of git. A few of them had to do with capturing some oddball CVS specific revision and branching history. None of the false starts were due to flaws or confusion in GitLab specifically. I should, and if you pester me I will, sanitize our internal how-to documents and scripts and contribute them to the Gitlab community so the next guy can benefit from our experience.
  - jobvandervoort 10y ago
    Pesters! It would be great to receive some contributions to our documentation. It has proven a big challenge to make sure it covers everything and stays up to date. We'd really appreciate it.
pjc50 10y ago
How about 20+ years of operational history from SCCS: http://fanf.livejournal.com/132656.html http://fanf.livejournal.com/132656.html
SatvikBeri 10y ago
One of the most successful companies I worked at had no version control or unit tests whatsoever. The code was all maintained by one person (the company relied heavily on custom software internally but it wasn't their product), who was able to keep the codebase small enough to basically hold in his head the whole time despite generating millions of dollars of value. That's certainly not how I would write code today, but it is amazing to see how much top-notch programmers vary.

_pmf_ 10y ago

They can argue rationally all they like; GitHub is the Oracle of VC hosting ... nobody will get fired for choosing GitHub.

pluma 10y ago
So far every early stage startup I've seen was using GitLab unless they only have open source / public projects and can use GitHub for free or need GitHub because of the community (it's still easier to get traction on GH as an open source project because so many developers already have a GH account). GitLab has seen steady growth for years and has recently been gaining an increasing level of attention (in part because of the pricing changes and dodgy politics at GitHub). It's here to stay. I hope GitLab.com will become more performant and stable. I would love to see GitHub for open source be replaced with a company actually built around open source rather than proprietary tech and catchy marketing.

hochchristoph 10y ago

Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12224723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12224723

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

hochchristoph 10y ago

Gitlab users: How many hours per year do you spend on doing maintenance for your setup? (servers, updating, backups, troubleshooting, etc.)

chewmieser 10y ago
I login to my server once a week and run a yum update. Backups are scheduled, so I don't have to concern myself with that. No troubleshooting. But we're a small (<10 developers across 4 repos with access granted to ~ 30 people to GitLab for ticketing) team. Even my non-technical people are able to use GitLab for ticketing without bugging me, so that's fantastic. Love it.
icebraining 10y ago
Spent 30m installing it and configuring SSL. Nowadays I spend a couple of minutes monthly doing "aptitude update && aptitude install gitlab-ce" (after 5-15m reading about the new release, to see if it's worth it / problem free). We never had an issue with the auto-upgrade. It comes with support for automatic offsite backups (we use S3), so besides occasionally restoring to make sure they're working, that takes no time at all.
timmipetit 10y ago
0 hours, we pay for the hosted option via https://githost.io/ https://githost.io/
pluma 10y ago
I'm using paid GitLab hosting via the GitLab-owned GitHost.io, so zero: everytime an update comes out I get two e-mails and that's it. The pricing is extremely competitive. We are a small shop so the smallest package ($35, recommended for up to 30 active users) is good enough. We started with a self-hosted GitLab via docker and switched to GitHost as soon as it was bought by GitLab.
zegerjan 10y ago
If you don't want to maintain GitLab, either CE or EE, but would like to use it, you might want to take a look at GitHost.io The instance I maintain takes me about 15 minutes a month. Security updates are done automatically so all I've got left to do it 'apt-get install gitlab-ce' once or twice a month and thats it!

hudell 10y ago

I recently moved my personal project from GitHub to GitLab and the whole process took me less than a minute, with a simple git remote set-url on the client side. The future is amazing.

jobvandervoort 10y ago
That's great to hear. Would love to hear your feedback.
- hudell 10y ago
  Sure! The only reason I wasn't using GitLab before is that I had a writer working remotely on my game and I didn't know how to explain to her how to use it. So I had moved everything to GitHub and told her to use their desktop app, which makes the clone/commit/push/pull flow amazingly simple.
kh_hk 10y ago
Not wanting to diminish what GitLab is doing, but what you mention is an inherent characteristic of git itself that applies the same way to GitHub, Bitbucket and a self hosted git bare repository. Any git host should expose a git interface for it to work as a git repository.
- hudell 10y ago
  Yes, but they simplified it a lot. I just connected to github, chose the repository and clicked import. Maybe all of those services have it that way, but I'm just glad that GitLab had it.
  - kh_hk 10y ago
    That is a different case than configuring a different remote on config and pushing to another host which is what I interpreted reading your comment, my bad. Out of curiosity, does the import process include all issues, PR and comments?

lima 10y ago

Phabricator is a great alternative, by the way. Really stable and has the best code review interface / workflow I've ever used.

ommunist 10y ago
+1 for phabricator
cookiesboxcar 10y ago
I really want to love phabricator, but the local install for a new team is so painful... any thoughts about how to make that better?
- collyw 10y ago
  Everyone is talking about installing these services. Don't they have a central hosted server like Gihub?
- Karunamon 10y ago
  I have this problem too. It's not hard to set up, there are just so many tiny pieces that need to be run by hand that it's going to take a human well over an hour to read through the docs and get it right. Someone made a Saltstack state[1] that I've used and had some success with - installing and configuring Salt from zero and using this config is still faster than installing Phabricator by hand. [1]: https://github.com/bougie/salt-phabricator-formula https://github.com/bougie/salt-phabricator-formula
  - lima 10y ago
    It's actually much easier to setup and operate than GitLab with its massive dependencies. Also a lot faster.
    - Karunamon 10y ago
      Gitlab is unfortunately a pig, in the large and bloated sense of the term. Which is really sad! I love the app, it looks better than Phabricator and does so much more, but then I can throw Phabricator on the same droplet I use for plenty of other stuff with resources to spare for $5/month, where Gitlab would require a dedicated $10 instance just due to memory usage alone. Guess I'm just not the target audience :(

romanr 10y ago

What is the benefit of moving to Gitlab from Bitbucket (or Github) for private repos? Same feature set, Gitlab cost more per user and on top of all you have to run your own server? Am I missing something here?

jobvandervoort 10y ago
I'll leave the marketing talk to less biased people here, but do note that: - you can use GitLab.com for free: unlimited public and private repositories, unlimited collaborators, free hosting of your Docker images, free hosting of your static site with any static site generator and free CI / CD - GitLab CE is fully open source (MIT Expat). You can easily install it anywhere you want.
- chrishacken 10y ago
  "you can use GitLab.com for free" It seems like that is the main selling point. However, I think that most of us don't want the extra weight of managing yet another tool. Thus why many of us use GitHub to begin with and not something else...
  - jobvandervoort 10y ago
    What do you mean with managing another tool? GitLab.com is our own instance, that we manage.
    - chrishacken 10y ago
      My fault, I didn't see that there was a free hosted version. I thought it was either free self-hosted or paid hosted.
  - corobo 10y ago
    Just to clarify GitLab.com is their hosted version, not the self-hosted option (Which is GitLab CE)

chrisan 10y ago

How about costs compared to Bitbucket? I appreciate what you guys are doing but I think Github is cashing in on their brand and for a while they had the best UX (they still might! but I no longer care anymore as all the competitors are "good enough" for me) which lets them set a high premium people will pay. However, I think it's unfair to leave out Bitbucket, they have come a long way. The first example of 8 developers and 20 repos is $10/month or 100 developers and 300 repos examples is $100/month What is the cost and/or time involved in maintaining DigitalOcean (or whatever VPS)? Security updates, upgrades, redundancy/availability, backups, or when something goes wrong the time involved in debugging/fixing (github/bitbucket have had their problems, is gitlab 100% available w/o hiccups)?

icebraining 10y ago
Very little time, in my experience. unattended-upgrades takes care of most security updates, a gitlab update is just "aptitude update && aptitude install gitlab-ce", and it automatically handles offsite backups.
tiimo 10y ago
If availability, security, backups etc. are highly critical for you and you don't want to host yourself, you could also have a look at our GitLab hosting service called GitHost (https://githost.io https://githost.io). It gives you your own private and secure GitLab instance on DigitalOcean which is completely maintained by us. GitHost for teams of up to 100 is $80/month.
collyw 10y ago
I find Githubs UI pretty poor.

hackerboos 10y ago

I've run Gitlab for about a year now and I think it's great. However it is sluggish on a 1GB box and I think you need at least 2GB. Since Linode doubled the RAM on their $10 boxes then you can get it for the same price.

OliverJones 10y ago
My gitlab-ce instance runs on a vm on an internal hypervisor machine. I just upped the RAM provisioning from 2gb to 4gb, and now it's plenty fast. One of the benefits of working for a software company that started in the pre-cloud era is a surplus of server boxes, now retrieved from colo racks. :-)

krautsourced 10y ago

I really liked Gitlab when last I tried it, but in the end I went with https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/ instead. For a small-ish team this felt like the most straight forward self-hosted solution. Still missing LFS though, which sucks, but it's being worked on.

raiso-lo 10y ago
We've been using https://rhodecode.com https://rhodecode.com for internal repositories: it is also open source, yet has better interface and out-of-the-box LFS support.
- mc42 10y ago
  The native subversion and mercurial support for the same repos is incredibly attractive. Any idea how it converts them to a shared format in real-time?
  - raiso-lo 10y ago
    @mc42 They use a common layer called "VCS server". Here's how it looks like from the system architecture standpoint: https://docs.rhodecode.com/RhodeCode-Enterprise/admin/system-overview.html#system-architecture https://docs.rhodecode.com/RhodeCode-Enterprise/admin/system...
    - mc42 10y ago
      Thanks, that's really cool.
- atomi 10y ago
  Does it have repo mirroring? One of my favorite features of Gogs is the ability to mirror a remote repository with automatic updates.
reactor 10y ago
Can't recommend gogs enough, slick/simple yet quite fast. Hassle free installation is a bonus.

technomancy 10y ago

I was pretty impressed with how easy it was to get free CI runs on pushes and merge requests with my OSS game: https://gitlab.com/technomancy/bussard/commit/73e84d11ed33fff42922841fb38df910b7ee00f1 https://gitlab.com/technomancy/bussard/commit/73e84d11ed33ff...

daveguy 10y ago
This made GitLab hosted repos well worth it for me over github or bitbucket: https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/ https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/
- gitdude 10y ago
  We recently launched pipelines, it is in beta right now: https://bitbucket.org/product/features/pipelines https://bitbucket.org/product/features/pipelines
jobvandervoort 10y ago
We're working hard on making CI super easy to use and setup. If you want to give it a spin, check out our recent blog post on starting from 0: https://about.gitlab.com/2016/07/29/the-basics-of-gitlab-ci/ https://about.gitlab.com/2016/07/29/the-basics-of-gitlab-ci/
- scrollaway 10y ago
  I was trying to look into Gitlab Runner the other day. How decoupled is it from Gitlab itself? Would I be able to somewhat easily write a completely different UI, with a different framework/language (say, Django), hook it all up to Github/Gogs and use Gitlab runner for the jobs themselves? Because if that's what it is, that is pretty kickass.
  - jobvandervoort 10y ago
    AFAIK you would not be able to do that. I've asked the author of Runner to comment here.

gnu8 10y ago

Earlier this week I had a family member get spooked by a web site with a fake blue screen tech support scam, the one where they tell you your computer has dire issues and you must pay them $300 to fix it. The page was taken down as of yesterday, but what is Gitlab doing to address this type of abuse in general?

coldpie 10y ago
You seem to have left out some context. What does this have to do with Gitlab?
- gnu8 10y ago
  Hosted by Gitlab.
  - sytse 10y ago
    If someone is abusing GitLab please use the 'i' on the user profile to report them.

ksec 10y ago

Small nit pick, why DO and not Linode? Faster CPU, more RAM and Bandwidth, cheaper as well.

ksec 10y ago
Not sure why the downvote, the article keeps bagging about saving cost, when Linode would have been a much better fit and cheaper. This isn't another ads or trolls. It is similar to AWS topic and recommending GCP, or Microsft Azure, all three are classed as similar with different tradeoff. So is Linode and DO. I do not think there are any other VPS provider then are in their class mindset wise.

merb 10y ago

We moved from BitBucket on premise to GitLab CE on premise. Actually most things now just works. Updating is a breeze. Instead of downloading a installer and copying / fixing server.xml we can just do a apt update && apt upgrade -y. Some things are a little bit akward but BitBucket didn't had this, too: - FF only merges is only EE (too bad that would be a really major selling point even for CE, squash button would be unnecessary) - CI is a little limited compared to a full blown Jenkins - We hit a CI bug which still shows up "Running" Pipelines https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/19455 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/19455 - Artifacts API is limited to everything or nothing - CI Stages can be defined as trigger only but you can't have multiple triggers that starting different things (considering a production trigger and a testing trigger while you don't want the 'manual' thing directly in GitLab, especially when integrating into other systems makes this a flaw) - No Custom CSS (yeah our logo isn't 72px x 72px...) But then again BitBucket didn't had these things anyway so except the bug it's nothing that would've hold us back. Everytime you wanted a Feature for BitBucket, the guys said that there is/was an extension. How dare that costed a shitload of money which would even superseeded GitLab EE.

jobvandervoort 10y ago
Thank you for the awesome detailed feedback. Responded point by point below: > FF only merges is only EE (too bad that would be a really major selling point even for CE, squash button would be unnecessary) These are always hard choices to make for us. We wrote about these decisions here [0]. > CI is a little limited compared to a full blown Jenkins - We hit a CI bug which still shows up "Running" Pipelines We're still young, but confident that we'll get there! CI/CD is a major focus for us and we're working really hard to improve it with every release. Love to get specific feature requests for things that we miss in comparison with Jenkins. Regarding the bug: I've pinged our PM on it. > Artifacts API is limited to everything or nothing Could you elaborate? I know we have numerous improvements planned, but I'm not sure about their prioritization. > CI Stages can be defined as trigger only but you can't have multiple triggers that starting different things (considering a production trigger and a testing trigger while you don't want the 'manual' thing directly in GitLab, especially when integrating into other systems makes this a flaw) Hm, could you write a feature proposal for this [1]? It sounds like a great improvement. > No Custom CSS (yeah our logo isn't 72px x 72px...) We're extremely hesitant to do this, as we make many changes between releases. This would break custom css with every upgrade, in turn resulting in a worse experience. I rather hear suggestions about specific parts in the interface that should be made customizable or suggestions about changes to the UI altogether. Although I'm not a fan of custom css, there is an issue to discuss this and I welcome your input there [2]. [0]: https://about.gitlab.com/2016/01/11/being-a-good-open-source-steward/ https://about.gitlab.com/2016/01/11/being-a-good-open-source... [1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/new https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/new [2]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/15635 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/15635

oDot 10y ago

I'm working on a proper Docker setup for GitLab development which I think can be made production-ready pretty easily after the development version works. It's hard separating the different moving parts (gitlab, gitlab-workhorse, gitlab-shell+ssh, postgres/mysql, redis) but I think I will have a merge request ready soon enough :D

jobvandervoort 10y ago
Wow, this sounds great! Do you have anything to share? Do you leverage GDK? [0] [0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-development-kit https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-development-kit
- oDot 10y ago
  Not right now. I'm following the install from source guide so it'll be as close as possible to production. I'll change some things the omnibus package does better, then apply the GDK stuff so people could use it for development. I have some code. I guess I can submit a merge request + issue on gitlab-ce and gitlab-workhorse, but I need to read CONTRIBUTING and PROCESS first :P

atsaloli 10y ago

I love how responsive our local (departmental) instance of GitLab CE is -- it's downright snappy compared to the corporate instance of JIRA. We love the issue tracking subsystem of GitLab and use it as our main ticketing system. We've done a few talks on Git basics to help increase adoption, and are doing a free webinar "Git Foundations: Basic Concepts and Definitions" next week: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/git-foundations-basic-concepts-and-definitions-tickets-26937970194 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/git-foundations-basic-concepts-... This is the sort of result it makes us very happy to achieve: "I have got by on minimum understanding of Git for a couple of years now--this really brought up my confidence in using Git. After I learned the Git internals, the esoteric commands really started falling into place." --Nicholas Santucci, Monitoring and Performance Engineer

jobvandervoort 10y ago
That's some great feedback, thanks! Any feature requests for Issues? If you plan on doing physical events, drop me an email (job at gitlab).
- atsaloli 10y ago
  We've done three physical events already. :-) I'll email you! Our next physical event will be teaching at Ohio Linux Fest (https://ohiolinux.org/olfi/ https://ohiolinux.org/olfi/)
- cdawzrd 10y ago
  Feature requests for Issues: priorities, and states other than open and closed. These are the biggest things keeping us from using GitLab issues rather than an external tool. We need to be able to set priorities (ideally customizable, but at minimum high/med/low). We can kind of do that through labels, but it's messy because you can only search for one label at a time (no boolean combinations of labels). Right now, when you assign an issue to a user, it's considered "in progress", and from there it can either be unassigned or closed. It would be nice to separate the state of the issue from the assigned user, since in our current workflow we assign many issues to a user, but that user might only be working on a few of them at a time. Using our current bug tracker, we can differentiate between "Open, unassigned", "Open, assigned", "Open, in progress", "Fixed", "Verified", "Closed", etc. I know having a completely customizable state diagram for issues is a big software task, but maybe there is some intermediary level of complexity that would allow better tracking of what is actually being worked on now vs. what is assigned to people.

igtztorrero 10y ago

If your concern is cost, bitbucket always have free private repositories. If your looking for privacy and protect your sacred code, install gitlab on one of your server or vps. Thats what we do at SAIT

cm3 10y ago
Fair point, but it's important not to fool ourselves in terms of data safety or at least specify what we mean when we say "it's private on your vps". If your code is private and not meant to fall into external hands, then putting it on a VPS won't protect it. The only way is to put it on a machine that's only used from workstations that access it in a local-only fashion, inside containers/vms that have no way to contact the outside world. This means the build process may not access the internet and has to rely on a cache of external libs if needed and allowed. This also implies that network config won't allow access as forbidden via VLANs or similar measures. If someone wants to steal your code, grabbing it from your vps won't be harder than doing the same on github/gitlab because the procedures to get access will be very similar. I suspect by private code you mean code which shouldn't be publicly clone'able but isn't behind locked doors otherwise.

thinkMOAR 10y ago

I would like to see that there is just one gitlab version, and that the enterprise features are simply available in the community edition too. I will not pay just for a feature like repo mirroring, but it's i think a feature many people will use and or utilise when moving, migrating to a gitlab setup. But it is the one and only feature i am missing so not worth upgrading to EE for me. As soon as an alternative (open source, self hosted, free) comes around that does have this built-in, i will be tempted to try it. (and of course on success i will move away from gitlab). But for now, gitlab (CE) works best for me, self hosted.

jobvandervoort 10y ago
We do our best to make CE and EE excellent, where the features that land in EE are mostly interesting for larger teams. For every feature that we don't bring to CE, this is always a hard decision. We wrote about this here: https://about.gitlab.com/2016/01/11/being-a-good-open-source-steward/ https://about.gitlab.com/2016/01/11/being-a-good-open-source...
- throwanem 10y ago
  I'd love to see an a la carte licensing option, where an organization could start with stock CE and license just the features they need. I realize that'd be a bear to implement, though.
- thinkMOAR 10y ago
  Hoi Job :) mogguh I understand, and money has to be made too. It's a nasty trade off. Though as i wrote to the other reply, its the service that is worth the money not necessarily the feature(s). IMHO, there is always a certain percentage of users that want to pay. The more users in total, the larger the amount of paying customers. And the repo mirroring would be a great feature to let me move a lot of github project users to gitlab without losing any potential updates from an upstream source. It would also allow for nice backup purposes, though you could do that now of course already with the hosted enterprise solution. But if the feature was in CE, many would be used, familiarised, to the feature, and perhaps see the added value of a backup node ($$) at gitlab.

crossman 10y ago

FWIW, I recently transferred my side project from bitbucket to gitlab and I'm really happy with it. The issue tracker is significantly better, and the built in CI seems great but I haven't started using it yet since I already have codeship going.

btcmike 10y ago
I did the same last month and then transferred back to bitbucket. The response time on gitlab.com was painfully slow. That extra 2-3 seconds waits for each commit was enough to drive me back. I still use github for professional projects and bitbucket for personal ones.
- jobvandervoort 10y ago
  I can imagine that GitLab.com was too slow. We just (two days ago) added another storage, where new repositories are created. That should be faster. I hope you're willing to give GitLab another try when we've improved the performance of GitLab.com or by hosting it yourself. Follow our work on GitLab.com performance here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/59 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/59
- bovermyer 10y ago
  I had the same experience. The other thing I would add is that the social side of Gitlab is not as refined as GitHub's. There's no "timeline," for example. I pay for GitHub and enjoy it.
  - 0x0 10y ago
    On the other hand, gitlab's "network" view of commit branches is excellent and I've never been able to find anything remotely similar on Github. Essential to manage development in multiple concurrent branches.
    - __david__ 10y ago
      Isn't that just gitk[1] or tig[2] (my favorite)? [1] comes with git, screenshot: http://static.lwn.net/images/ns/kernel/gitk.png http://static.lwn.net/images/ns/kernel/gitk.png [2] http://jonas.nitro.dk/tig/ http://jonas.nitro.dk/tig/

spriggan3 10y ago

Does Github has a on premise offer like Bitbucket or Gitlab ?

dthakur 10y ago
Github Enterprise.
moby 10y ago
Indeed we do. GitHub Enterprise 2.7 was just released yesterday: https://enterprise.github.com/home https://enterprise.github.com/home

AWildDHHAppears 10y ago

Interesting. For projects that don't need a "community" we've been using Amazon CodeCommit. We don't like to use Github anymore because of the politics there. Example: We had a project involving software filters that included this sentence in the description: > Phase is related to time, but a pure time delay does not involve any phase shift. A pure time delay or "group delay" is constant with frequency. Phase shift varies with frequency and can advance or retard as the frequency changes. We got a note from a woman who works at github who was apparently scanning open source projects for "offensive" words. Our project was flagged for the use of the word "retard". We removed our project and never used github again.

theli0nheart 10y ago
Wow, that is absurd. Did you ever follow up with the employee who sent you a note? What did flagging entail? I.e., were you not able to use the repo?
- AWildDHHAppears 10y ago
  Yes. She indicated that it doesn't matter how the word is used, some will see it as aggressive. As she appeared to be a non-technical person mysteriously employed by GitHub as some consolation to some organization (IIRC it was called the "Ada Initiative") I realized that github is no longer a technology company. It's a Social Justice company. Good luck to them--I don't even disagree with the basic premise--but I like my git repo companies to be worried about git.
  - hrayr 10y ago
    Some of the commenters here assumed that the message was automated, you're making it abundantly clear thats was not the case. In fact she defended her position. Did you try to escalate it? This is absurd.
matthewmacleod 10y ago
We removed our project and never used github again. That seems like a totally disproportionate approach versus responding with a polite 'this is a legitimate use of the word, thanks' message.

matthewmacleod 10y ago

GitLab is great and it's lovely to see a diverse selection of tools, but I'm not too convinced of the cost benefits – for a team with 100 developers, the annual cost of ~$11,000 is a pretty small amount compared to the maybe $25m salaries you'll be paying!

danielrmay 10y ago
Avg salary of $250k per dev? Are you hiring?
- dr_zoidberg 10y ago
  Well where I live, the final salary you get in your pocket is about 60% of what the employer has to pay (the rest are taxes and "social charges" which include medical insurance and retirement funds). If it's the same where OP lives, then he was probably thinking about 125k salarys + taxes, charges, etc. Also, he must be considering other expenses that come with having employees (though he did say "25m in salaries"). Still, if you bring the salaries to 100k a year, it still compares favorably to GitLab: $11k vs 10M.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  You of course realize that "salary seen by the employee" is not at all the same as "costs payed by the employer". (For example, social security and health insurance).
- matthewmacleod 10y ago
  I would guess fully-loaded cost is 2x salary, so perhaps I should have said "amount you'll be paying for staff" :)
akerro 10y ago
Could you take a look at price for GitHub for same big team please?
- matthewmacleod 10y ago

tomjen3 10y ago

Gitlab is pretty awesome, especially because they let you have unlimited private repositories on their website. So far my biggest annoyance is that when you click on a project you don't get a list of files (like you do on github) but just the projects readme, and even then only if you remembered to capitalize it.

connorshea 10y ago
In Settings you can set the "Project view" to Files view and it'll give you what you're looking for :) https://gitlab.com/profile/preferences https://gitlab.com/profile/preferences

mrmondo 10y ago

As I always say on every GitLab post on HN (and no I'm not paid to nor do I have any affiliation with the company) - we switched from a combination of Github + Gitolite/Gitosis to GitLab not long after it was release and my god it's damn good, It's really impressed us particularly in the last 12 months how rapidly they're developing the product and getting new released / fixed / features out. Especially like Gitlab CI w/ Docker.

jobvandervoort 10y ago
Thanks, always great to see you here!

dijit 10y ago

I posted before[0] about why I moved to gitlab; I'm using a self-hosted instance and the only real complaint I have is resource consumption. But if you bite the bullet a bit it's a really great product. The other thing would be "ease of deployment" or lack thereof- if you're going for anything other than omnibus installs or docker images then it can be a bit painful. (I wanted to run on freebsd for example). But, yes, it's super nice to have something not only comparable to github but even superior in some areas. I would definitely run the enterprise edition if that were my decision at work. [0]: https://libsecure.so/t/github-alternative-aka-weve-moved-git-drk-sc/203 https://libsecure.so/t/github-alternative-aka-weve-moved-git...

tedmiston 10y ago
Similar view for myself; though the resource consumption is such a minor complaint that I don't even really consider it relative to all of the benefits GitLab provides.
haynes 10y ago
How has your experience of installing gitlab on freebsd been? Anything in particular that can be improved? I'm pretty sure the gitlab team is open for all kind of improvements. :)
- dijit 10y ago
  Someone wrote a very nice and detailed guide, however upgrading isn't mentioned[0] it also suggests operating under bad practices like running gitlab from /home/ I guess I could write a decent salt-formula to do all this, but I can't handle upgrading of gitlab easily, it always breaks when I take a new branch from git and run a gitlab-ctl reconfigure. [0]: https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlab-recipes/blob/master/install/freebsd/freebsd-10.md https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlab-recipes/blob/master/insta...
  - hs86 10y ago
    The pkg-message of the Gitlab port has some useful links to more documentation. https://www.freshports.org/www/gitlab/ https://www.freshports.org/www/gitlab/ https://github.com/t-zuehlsdorff/gitlabhq/blob/master/doc/install/installation-freebsd.md https://github.com/t-zuehlsdorff/gitlabhq/blob/master/doc/in... https://github.com/t-zuehlsdorff/gitlabhq/blob/master/doc/update/freebsd_patch_versions.md https://github.com/t-zuehlsdorff/gitlabhq/blob/master/doc/up... https://github.com/t-zuehlsdorff/gitlabhq/blob/master/doc/update/8.6-to-8.7-freebsd.md https://github.com/t-zuehlsdorff/gitlabhq/blob/master/doc/up...

senthil_rajasek 10y ago

"Phase shift varies with frequency and can advance or retard as the frequency changes" I looked up Webster's American English Thesaurus and the antonym for 'advance' in the sense that it's used in your sentence is recede. Here is the same sentence rewritten using recede. "Phase shift varies with frequency and can advance or recede as the frequency changes." This is an easy case where you could have used correct language. If you would like to know why it's offensive to some people, I could educate you.

assface 10y ago
> If you would like to know why it's offensive to some people, I could educate you. Please do. https://i.imgur.com/jElyDnl.jpg https://i.imgur.com/jElyDnl.jpg
justinpombrio 10y ago
"retard" is also a correct word to use here; it means "to delay". > If you would like to know why it's offensive to some people, I could educate you. Could you educate us as to why it's offensive in this context? I think we all know why calling a mentally handicapped person "retarded" offends some people, but no one did so.
- senthil_rajasek 10y ago
  Since you asked, Words are powerful and stir up emotions. In this context, someone stigmatized as "slow" or "dumb" by society, reading a sentence with the word "retard" in it has to deal with bad memories from the past rather than understanding the concepts in this sentence. Clearly, an alternative word choice exists. That's one reason why it's offensive.
  - zeveb 10y ago
    > Words are powerful and stir up emotions. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Yes, words do stir up emotions, but well-adjusted adults learn as children to control and channel their emotions in healthy, constructive ways, rather than permitting themselves to be debilitated by seeing a perfectly correct word used perfectly correctly — and inoffensively. > In this context, someone stigmatized as "slow" or "dumb" by society, reading a sentence with the word "retard" in it has to deal with bad memories from the past rather than understanding the concepts in this sentence. Someone so emotionally fragile would be offended even by reading your sentence about the original sentence!

matt4077 10y ago

I tried their free tier and it was just extremely slow. A small project where commits usually took 5 seconds now needed >1min for any operation. Moved it all into the google cloud and it works at the speed of the network. But we don't really need any of the features except the git repository anyway.

connorshea 10y ago
Free tier as in self-hosted GitLab CE or GitLab.com? Self-hosted might be slow if you don't have enough RAM on the system you're running it with, but as long as you have more than 2GB it definitely shouldn't take more than 1 minute for a basic operation. As for GitLab.com, that can be slow (we're working on improving it, much better now than it was last year, but still progress to be made!), but it should never take more than a minute, otherwise it'd just timeout. When did you try it out?

zthall 10y ago

If GitLab's issues allow you to mark as unread or flag it in any way to come back to it, then I'm sold. I can't believe this still isn't a Github feature. I don't know how many times I've lost track of issues or forgotten because I can't flag them.

connorshea 10y ago
You'll be very happy to hear about Todos[1] then! You can add a todo or mark it as done from the sidebar on any issue or merge request. It'll stay in your Todo list until you mark it as done or comment on the issue/MR. We'll be waiting for you at https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in :P [1]: http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/todos.html http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/todos.html

gravypod 10y ago

The idea of switching from one company that holds your data to another doesn't make sense to me. What does make sense and is worth working for is being able to host my own code on my network. That's where GitLab really comes in for my work. I have no reason to switch from one platform to another if I can't host it in my own network. GitLab was a great idea but from my experience it's been built on an extremely frustrating method of deployment. I'm not a dev ops person nor do I want to be. I want things to be as simple as "run this and it will work" without me needing to do much of anything. I tried to setup a GitLabs instance but after running a simple update command (apt-get update && apt-get upgrade) it broke. It seemed to have something to do with something called Sidekick at the time or something along those lines. It was just frustrating that the automated update scripts from their deb BROKE their own system. That just should never be a possibility in a system, I have near no tolerance for dealing with crap like that. After messing around with it for a while I gave up and tried Gogs. It was easier to use but using go's build tools yielded similar problem for me. It's not the easiest thing to setup and takes a bit of know how to get Gogs and golang's build tools working (I know someone is going to tell me I'm wrong and that this did not happen to me). I settled on GitBucket [1] and I have to say I'll not be switching to anything else. It was simple: download and run a single jar file. I setup an unprivileged user, it's own opt folder, and a small init.d script to do everything I needed. To update I download the latest version and I do a drop in replacement with the .jar. Nothing difficult. (Sadly GitHub seems to have put legal pressure on them to change their 'look' so they've done that but before that it was perfectly stable in appearance unlike GitLabs). If anyone is interested in the self-hosting aspect of this, I'd say don't look at GitLabs, Gogs, or any of the other systems out there. Look at GitBucket. [1] - https://gitbucket.github.io/ https://gitbucket.github.io/

dijit 10y ago
I'm surprised you're not running the docker instance, it's literally "run this and it will work" in fact, most of their instructions are rather on the nose.
- gravypod 10y ago
  Getting docker working for me has always been a pain. I've still not gotten as docker install working across updates or dist-upgrades. Again, I'm as much of a sysadmin/debops is a neurologist in the way that I'm in no way a neurologist. If I cut open someones head, maybe messed around with some things, and closed it up they might be ok. That's how my servers 'run'. Anything outside securing the system (ssh key auth, non-root user, etc) to a standard good enough for me is not doable.

EugeneOZ 10y ago

Their UI is too slow (as many other Ruby web apps).

sytse 10y ago
If you're talking about GitLab.com, this is due to other issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/59 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/59 If you're talking about a self hosted instance, we think it is OK right now and frontend code will get better now that we adopted https://vuejs.org/ https://vuejs.org/

jgalt212 10y ago

Dumb question: For self hosting, what's wrong with a shared file server and nice GUI such as TortoiseHG? There seem to be a bunch of Git GUIs as well: https://git-scm.com/download/gui/linux https://git-scm.com/download/gui/linux

collinmanderson 10y ago

> GitLab really started accelerating in 2015 as this commit graph shows They're using a Github commit graph to show how good Gitlab is? GitLab's graphs aren't as nice? :)

educar 10y ago

We are a company of 10 on GitLab CE (We selfhost via the Cloudron). Costs us ~60 a month, so it's already cheap for us. We also have a bunch of other apps on it which saves us more money.