5 ms·

GitHub has stronger 'social' features and it's better for people who want to connect to other devs or build portfolios. GitLab is years ahead of GitHub for cer

by pid-1 5y ago

GitHub has stronger 'social' features and it's better for people who want to connect to other devs or build portfolios. GitLab is years ahead of GitHub for certain stuff (e.g. CI/CD) and IMO it has a better commercial offering for business. I use GitHub as my portfolio profile for free and GitLab in my $JOB. That's my opinion tho, I'm just a person who uses both.

pjot 5y ago
In an interview I had with GL the interviewer mentioned “people use GH for open source work, and GL for closed”.
- la_fayette 5y ago
  Thats somehow funny, as GH is closed source and GL is open source...
  - 10000truths 5y ago
    Makes perfect sense to me. Because GL is open source, it can be easily self hosted, which is great for data residency compliance, or specialized security needs.
    - devoutsalsa 5y ago
      Self hosting is never easy. If you nerf the GitLab database by doing something unsupported or because of a bug, good luck with that. Source: an employer of mine nerfed the GitLab database and support to fix it was not an option, so we had to migrate to their cloud offering.
      - mritzmann 5y ago
        Self hosting GitLab = Run 1 single Docker Container. Very easy.
      - polskibus 5y ago
        It’s mostly a matter of backups. Only pick self hosted if you can back it up reliably every night.
      - __turbobrew__ 5y ago
        The gitlab omnibus installation has built in support for backups. Literally just run a single command to create a backup on a network share. Not having backups for gitlab on prem is just lazy system administration.
        devoutsalsa 5y ago
        It wasn't a problem of losing the DB. The database got corrupted some how. All of the backups eventually became corrupted. This prevented us from upgrading from some version to some other version.
vultour 5y ago
GitHub's CI pipelines are behind GitLab? My lord, here I was thinking about moving to GitHub Enterprise when our subscription expires because everything in GitLab feels like an unfinished weekend project. Seems like nobody can get anywhere near the functionality of Jenkins.
- mooreds 5y ago
  > Seems like nobody can get anywhere near the functionality of Jenkins. I've heard Jenkins is a nightmare to administer (not sure about the new versions). Seems like an opportunity: the power of Jenkins with modern sensibility.
  - cyberpunk 5y ago
    Jenkins is a nightmare because everyone decided to spend months customising it with groovy and it became overly specific to your team/dept. The servers themselves are quite simple (single .jar, etc). These days we have containers, and it's made CI a much better thing.
    - mikepurvis 5y ago
      I agree with this. The quality of your Jenkins experience will be pretty much inversely proportional to how much groovy script is in your Jenkinsfiles. Every new permutation of parameters is a new chance for something to go wrong, and there's basically no sane way to unit test or validate any of your "helper" functions, so they're all write-once-change-never. Which is not necessarily a problem inherent in Jenkins— Jenkins just gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself. GitLab CI can get silly too, but culturally it inherits from the much simpler Travis model, where you're basically expected to just be wrapping some other build tool (eg, tox from the Python world) rather than rolling the whole thing yourself.
      - outworlder 5y ago
        Groovy is arguably the wrong language choice, even if it worked fine in other aspects. The string handling situation alone is crazy, which is compounded if you are using it with bash (which has its own crazy ideas about string escaping). That's a not too uncommon scenario. You end up with this: https://gist.github.com/Faheetah/e11bd0315c34ed32e681616e41279ef4 https://gist.github.com/Faheetah/e11bd0315c34ed32e681616e412...
skeeter2020 5y ago
Remember that GitHub is not MS's enterprise product in this space. When they acquired GH everyone waited for "the merge" and I think they've been really smart to (at least) appear to be hands off. I can happily use GH for my stuff while cursing Azure DevOps for work without going crazy.
whymarrh 5y ago
Yeah they’re similar feature-wise but the communities that exists on GitHub vs. GitLab aren’t remotely comparable.

by pid-1 5y ago

pjot 5y ago

In an interview I had with GL the interviewer mentioned “people use GH for open source work, and GL for closed”.

la_fayette 5y ago
Thats somehow funny, as GH is closed source and GL is open source...
- 10000truths 5y ago
  Makes perfect sense to me. Because GL is open source, it can be easily self hosted, which is great for data residency compliance, or specialized security needs.
  - devoutsalsa 5y ago
    Self hosting is never easy. If you nerf the GitLab database by doing something unsupported or because of a bug, good luck with that. Source: an employer of mine nerfed the GitLab database and support to fix it was not an option, so we had to migrate to their cloud offering.
    - mritzmann 5y ago
      Self hosting GitLab = Run 1 single Docker Container. Very easy.
    - polskibus 5y ago
      It’s mostly a matter of backups. Only pick self hosted if you can back it up reliably every night.
    - __turbobrew__ 5y ago
      The gitlab omnibus installation has built in support for backups. Literally just run a single command to create a backup on a network share. Not having backups for gitlab on prem is just lazy system administration.
      - devoutsalsa 5y ago
        It wasn't a problem of losing the DB. The database got corrupted some how. All of the backups eventually became corrupted. This prevented us from upgrading from some version to some other version.

vultour 5y ago

GitHub's CI pipelines are behind GitLab? My lord, here I was thinking about moving to GitHub Enterprise when our subscription expires because everything in GitLab feels like an unfinished weekend project. Seems like nobody can get anywhere near the functionality of Jenkins.

mooreds 5y ago
> Seems like nobody can get anywhere near the functionality of Jenkins. I've heard Jenkins is a nightmare to administer (not sure about the new versions). Seems like an opportunity: the power of Jenkins with modern sensibility.
- cyberpunk 5y ago
  Jenkins is a nightmare because everyone decided to spend months customising it with groovy and it became overly specific to your team/dept. The servers themselves are quite simple (single .jar, etc). These days we have containers, and it's made CI a much better thing.
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    I agree with this. The quality of your Jenkins experience will be pretty much inversely proportional to how much groovy script is in your Jenkinsfiles. Every new permutation of parameters is a new chance for something to go wrong, and there's basically no sane way to unit test or validate any of your "helper" functions, so they're all write-once-change-never. Which is not necessarily a problem inherent in Jenkins— Jenkins just gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself. GitLab CI can get silly too, but culturally it inherits from the much simpler Travis model, where you're basically expected to just be wrapping some other build tool (eg, tox from the Python world) rather than rolling the whole thing yourself.
    - outworlder 5y ago
      Groovy is arguably the wrong language choice, even if it worked fine in other aspects. The string handling situation alone is crazy, which is compounded if you are using it with bash (which has its own crazy ideas about string escaping). That's a not too uncommon scenario. You end up with this: https://gist.github.com/Faheetah/e11bd0315c34ed32e681616e41279ef4 https://gist.github.com/Faheetah/e11bd0315c34ed32e681616e412...

skeeter2020 5y ago

Remember that GitHub is not MS's enterprise product in this space. When they acquired GH everyone waited for "the merge" and I think they've been really smart to (at least) appear to be hands off. I can happily use GH for my stuff while cursing Azure DevOps for work without going crazy.

whymarrh 5y ago

Yeah they’re similar feature-wise but the communities that exists on GitHub vs. GitLab aren’t remotely comparable.