In 2011, Dimitriy Zaporozhets and Valery Sizov, two engineers from Ukraine, made it available as a free, open-source program. In 2014, they established Gitab, Inc. GitLab, Inc. bought a number of businesses, such as Gitorious in 2015, Gitter in 2017, and Gemnasium in 2018, adding new users to the hosted service and enhancing its features. In this blog post, we are going to learn about Gitlab.
We will discuss:
- What is GitLab?
- How GitLab works?
- Why use GitLab?
- Features and Advantages
- Disadvantages
- GitLab vs. GitHub
- Alternatives for GitLab
- Conclusion
What is GitLab?
GitLab is a popular open-source Git hosting solution used by over 50,000 businesses. It has evolved with strong community support and growth over the last few years, handling thousands of users on a single server and several such servers on an active cluster.
It is a self-hosted code management system. It was first released in October 2011 and has been updated every 22nd of the month since then. It was distributed under the MIT license.
How Gitlab works?
GitLab’s core user functionality is a visual Git repository management system that allows users to browse, audit, merge, and perform other common tasks that would otherwise necessitate the command line interface. The majority of the front-end user experience is powered by Ruby on Rails running behind a web server, which sends tasks to a backend helper called Gitlab-Runner written in Go via a jobs pool on a Redis server.
GitLab Shell is used for managing repositories, whereas PostgreSQL stores metadata about users, repositories, wiki docs, and more.
The component diagram below contains a complete architecture diagram.
Why use GitLab?
GitLab applications provide the functionality to automate the entire DevOps process, which includes designing, creating, building, verifying, testing, deploying, and monitoring scalability, reputation, availability, and replication. Its popularity is growing by the day. Because of its extensive features and code building blocks. The collaboration of code platforms that can be reused and implemented is essential. It has many CI/CD pipelines, a container registry, Kubernetes integration, and the best data portability. Data integration and monitoring improve it’s sustainability.
GitLab projects can be made private or public, and it is open-source to allow everyone free access. It’s public repository can be used for wikis, documentation, and issue tracking. It allows the team to collaborate and work on code written in Go and Ruby. It is intended to store information as well as an array of committed objects with a number of references to them. It serves as a central hub for beginners and developers to create, save, test, share, and collaborate on all web projects.
Features and Advantages
Below are the advantages of GitLab:
- It’s main advantage over competitors is its ability to run in a self-hosted/on-premises environment.
- In-depth Source Code Management (SCM) enables developers to easily review, track, and merge branches.
- Continuous Integration (CI) is a pipeline that automates the compilation, testing, and validation of software builds.
- You can restrict merge and push to specific users using detailed permissions.
- Wiki pages enable detailed project documentation.
- GitLab Pages offers free static websites that are hosted on Git repositories.
- Automatic secret detection and security testing aid in the security of your codebase.
- Time tracking, productivity analytics, and Jira integration help your team stay on track.
- It also offers premium plans with enterprise-level features such as detailed contribution analytics, group and project insights, code quality reports, and compliance tracking.
Disadvantages
Just like every other tool, GitLab has several drawbacks of its own, including:
- For reviewing, the UI can be a little challenging.
- There are a few problems with the tool itself, which can make it a little sloppy.
GitLab vs. GitHub
GitLab and GitHub are both excellent tools. Except for It’s ability to run as an open-source application on-premises, the feature differences are minor.
- It has a self-hosted product called Gitlab CE, whereas GitHub is entirely hosted Software as a Service (SaaS).
- It was the first to provide integrated CI, and while GitHub added CI functionality through Actions, it provides an easier path to DevOps automation out of the box.
- It has native time-tracking support, whereas GitHub requires a third-party Marketplace app.
- The developer community on GitHub is larger.
Source: GitLab
Alternatives for GitLab
- Red Hat Ansible.
- Azure Pipelines.
- CloudBees Flow.
- Octopus Deploy.
- Continuous Delivery Automation (CDA).
- UrbanCode Deploy.
- Puppet Enterprise.
Conclusion
GitLab assists teams in shortening product lifecycles and increasing productivity, which creates value for customers. We hope that this blog has helped you understand the fundamentals of Gitlab & its importance.
FAQs
How does GitLab differ from other version control systems?
GitLab stands out by offering an all-in-one solution, encompassing not only version control but also various DevOps tools, issue tracking, code review, and automation, all within a single platform.
Is GitLab open-source?
Yes, GitLab is available in both a community edition (CE) that is open-source and a premium edition (EE) with additional features and support.
What are the core features of GitLab?
GitLab provides features such as Git repository management, CI/CD pipelines, code review, issue tracking, project planning, container registry, and more.
Does GitLab support Continuous Integration (CI)?
Yes, GitLab offers built-in CI/CD capabilities that allow you to automate the building, testing, and deployment of your code.
Is GitLab suitable for Agile development?
Yes, GitLab provides tools like project boards, issue tracking, and milestones, which are well-suited for Agile methodologies.
What is the GitLab Container Registry?
GitLab Container Registry is a feature that allows you to store and manage Docker container images within GitLab.
Can I integrate third-party tools with GitLab?
Yes, GitLab offers integrations with various third-party tools and services, such as JIRA, Slack, Jenkins, Kubernetes, and more.
Does GitLab offer cloud hosting?
Yes, GitLab offers a cloud-based solution known as GitLab.com, where you can host your repositories and projects.
How much does GitLab cost?
GitLab offers a range of pricing options, including a free tier (CE) and various paid plans (EE) with additional features and support.
Related/References
- What Is DevOps | DevOps Principles | Advantages Of DevOps | Why DevOps?
- Agile Methodology and DevOps | DevOps and Agile Relationship
- DevOps Best Practices
- What Is DevOps? AWS DevOps For Beginners
- [AZ-400] Microsoft Azure DevOps Certification Exam: Everything You Need To Know
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Certification Exam: Everything You Must Know
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