GitLab 8.0 released with new looks and integrated CI

https://about.gitlab.com/2015/09/22/gitlab-8-0-released/

by jobvandervoort • 11 years ago

257 131 11 years ago

about.gitlab.com

Easily the biggest change for GitLab to date. CI is now built-in and it's all easier on the eyes.

We also removed the satellites, on which we used to do certain git operations. This frees up space, but also makes merges must more stable and faster.

Let us know if you have any questions or comments.

leejo2• 11 years ago

With this release is it necessary to migrate to the built in CI or can we still point at a different gitlab-CI server? We have gitlab running privately in a VPC on AWS but have gitlab-CI running locally (dedicated local server for the manager and runners) so, essentially, merging the two isn't going to be trivial.

jobvandervoort27• 11 years ago

No. We wouldn't be able to support and keep development going while supporting two different CI apps.

Only the coordinator moves, so in theory you'd be able to use the same runners.

It's not a trivial migration, we know. That is why we do this with a major release. We're also continuously improving the documentation for this migration.

Our customers can reach out for online support, of course.

myko• 11 years ago

This looks awesome! I've been playing with it today and have setup a docker instance for doing Android builds on the same (Linux) machine that I've installed Gitlab on. I'm having trouble setting up Xcode/iOS builds on a Mac Mini over ssh and I don't see any specific documentation on that. Is that something you can point me to?

jsnathan• 11 years ago

I think I like the menu UI improvements in the screenshots. Those tiny symbols were a major pain for any new user, and it's good to see words next to them now.

But is it possible yet to make the project files show up in the default view for projects? Many user interactions with a project don't go beyond browsing the files, and I wish I could enable GH-style default views.

jobvandervoort27• 11 years ago

The text was always there, but is collapsed by choice and on small screens.

It's either Activity or Readme now. I don't think it'd be very hard to add Files to that and don't have major problems with it.

Consider sending a MR or creating an issue [0] to discuss this further.

0: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues

sytse24• 11 years ago

I love this idea and created an issue for it https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2655

qznc• 11 years ago

When will the Sandstorm package be updated? Will it support CI?

https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/zx9d3pt0fjh4uqrprjftgpqfwgzp6y...

jobvandervoort27• 11 years ago

Not up to us, but I'm sure it will. We have an amazing community of organisations, users, contributors that are often very fast adopting our new releases.

It will support CI. GitLab CI works with a central coordinator (now inside of GitLab) and external Runners.

The Runner can be anything outside of the instance. This makes it easy to configure them to your liking and doesn't slow down you GitLab instance while builds are running.

Documentation on Runners: http://doc.gitlab.com/ci/runners/README.html

danielsamuels2• 11 years ago

The Mattermost preview screenshot is an odd choice - have a read of the conversation.

jobvandervoort27• 11 years ago

Got it from the Mattermost Beta1 announcement. Think it's inappropriate?

danielsamuels2• 11 years ago

Just seems weird for the conversation to be about how someone refuses to switch to it, that's all. :)

it33• 11 years ago

Mattermost team here. Sorry if the screenshot is confusing.

The text of the screenshot was actually written in Slack, and the goal of the screenshot was to demonstrate the Slack Import feature to GitLab Mattermost.

On the GitLab Mattermost page (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-mattermost) there was a subtitle describing this, but we could have made it more clear in the screenshot itself.

mtrycz• 11 years ago

The messaging integration certainly looks really good, we're trying out Let's Chat, but development is kinda slow (and we don't have the time to contribute). How does GitLab CI compare to Jenkins? Will I be able to substitute it for simple and complex projects?

Is there a slender version of GitLab for small computers like the RaspberryPi? All of the dependencies kinda hog/slow it down, and I don't really need realtime performance. I've grown fond of the interface (at work), and would like to use it for my hobby projects.

jobvandervoort27• 11 years ago

GitLab CI should be able to replace Jenkins. Obviously, it doesn't have the maturity of Jenkins or the plugin ecosystem, but it's flexible runner system, easy configuration with .gitlab-ci.yml and integration with GitLab make it quite powerful.

You can already have multiple, parallel builds, builds on success/failure, trigger builds and thus create pipelines. We don't support build artifacts yet, but you can circumvent this by using something like S3 for output. We'll add this in the future as well.

GitLab should run just fine on Raspberry Pi 2. Do you have any data on slow down?

sytse24• 11 years ago

To download for the Raspberry Pi 2 just go to the download page and select that option https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/

mrmondo2• 11 years ago

We switched to building with Gitlab-CI and haven't looked back. A big bonus over Jenkins is the lack of Java.

transfire2• 11 years ago

"If you runners overload your CI system now both go down" Isn't that a bit worrisome?

jobvandervoort27• 11 years ago

Where does it say that?

It should say that they don't both go down! Runners are fully external to GitLab and GitLab CI. This means they will never interfere with GitLab's functioning.

You should not host a Runner on a GitLab instance. It was not intended like that and in the documentation we explicitly tell you to not do this.

transfire2• 11 years ago

I feel much better about it now. Thanks.

I read it under "advantages and disadvantages".

pwpwp• 11 years ago

The killer feature (for me) would be if GitLab supported the GitHub API (even if just a subset).

jobvandervoort27• 11 years ago

In what way?

ihsw• 11 years ago

GitLab could function (at least somewhat) as a drop-in replacement for GitHub, as existing GitHub API client libraries could point to GitLab instead with minimal/zero modification.

netcraft3• 11 years ago

Will it take some time to propagate? Using the omnibus AMI on ubuntu and doing sudo apt-get update / sudo apt-get install gitlab-ce doesn't pull the update.

jobvandervoort27• 11 years ago

It should work!

I double checked and upgraded my personal instance and it works here. Did apt-get update complete succesfully?

Repo is here for double checking: https://packages.gitlab.com/gitlab/gitlab-ce

netcraft3• 11 years ago

It looks like everything is working properly, this is what I get if you are interested: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/4792e387f33155308ddf

scrollaway4• 11 years ago

Congratulations GitLab team. I've been really thrilled to see the project evolve and I'm super excited to see this update. And I don't even use GitLab :)

@jobvo I remember leaving extremely lengthy UX and feature feedback here on HN a few weeks back - Email followup never happened. I hope you guys considered working on mailing list support in the style of a Google Groups / Discourse UI. It'd go really well with the Mattermost integration (which I'm also really excited to see).

jobvandervoort27• 11 years ago

Thanks!

I do still owe you a folllowup! Wanted to push this out first before weaving in new suggestions and feedback. My apologies.

You can now reply to notifications, which already gives you some of that functionality. We're interested in expanding this.

We'll add a feature that allows you to email GitLab to create a new issue in a future release. Shouldn't be far off, now that we laid the groundwork for receiving email.

scrollaway4• 11 years ago

That sounds like some good groundwork. Do you have plans to expand this to a proper ML system? Eg. I have a project and want to coordinate one list for translators, one list for devs, and one list for user support.

Gedrovits• 11 years ago

Looks promising. Maybe even will try it out.

jobvandervoort27• 11 years ago

Try it on GitLab.com for free (no limits).

pavanky• 11 years ago

It seems to be down at the moment?

patrickaljord2• 11 years ago

Shameless plug, if you have composehub installed, you can just do "ch run gitlab" and it will download and run gitlab for you on your machine. You just need docker installed on your machine https://composehub.com/package/gitlab

utrack• 11 years ago

Error is returned. Nothing specific on my side, check your logs :)

nstart2• 11 years ago

I've been following gitlab for some time now. Both as a product and a company. Not only is it an amazing product, but from everything I've read they've made a really interesting culture. Would actually love to work for the company. Congrats to the team on shipping this. I'll be giving it a whirl soon :)

jobvandervoort27• 11 years ago

Thanks, that's nice to hear. Love to hear your feedback.

This is where I shamelessly tell you that we're hiring for almost any position.

nstart2• 11 years ago

Nice! Not sure if you are still looking at the the thread, I know Gitlab allows for fully remote (yep, I've read the manifesto :D ) but would you be ok with someone working from Sri Lanka? Time zone differences being main concern?

nadams• 11 years ago

Have you looked at other products?

whitenoice• 11 years ago

Can we run gitlab 8.0 without CI?

jobvandervoort27• 11 years ago

You can just not use it. There will be a few links in the UI, but it will not cost you anything.

Note that you can still integrate with your current CI.

sytse24• 11 years ago

And the links will mostly be in the settings menu's. In GitLab 8.1 there should be zero links added to dashboard/group/project navigation https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2594

max_peck• 11 years ago

How do we point to an existing CI environment? In 7.14 we used GitLab CI service and pointed it to the Jenkins project URL. With the CI integration it appears those options have been removed.

Keats• 11 years ago

Looks good!

One question though, clicking on any of the files on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/tree/master/config takes at least 10s to open, is it because the site is being hammered right now?

jobvandervoort27• 11 years ago

Yes. We went from 3 to 50 c4.4xlarge nodes in the past few months and are working hard to keep up with the demand of the growth.

taesu2• 11 years ago

This patch is a game changer. Wow! I really love gitlab, however one thing: I wish you can view people's activity calendar even if the projects are private.

jobvandervoort27• 11 years ago

Good to hear!

I wish you can view people's activity calendar even if the projects are private.

That would show you private information, which is not what we want.

taesu2• 11 years ago

maybe, just notification (light green to dark green) to indicate the commits. I just wish to show my potential employeers that I work privately in gitlab instead of github. regardless, this integrated CI inhouse is defiantely something that I really really looked for.

bigtunacan• 11 years ago

I'm going to agree with Taesu here, and elaborate a bit.

Some potential employers these days are looking at interviewees commit calendars on GitHub; and this is something I can provide to show I'm a very productive coder.

"Go look at my commit history; see I sure do a lot of coding."

So I agree with you about keeping the information private, but I think this could be solved by doing something like this.

- Public Activity:

   Display detailed information. Commit number, message, repo. (What you are showing today)

- Private Activity;

  (Username) made X(number) of commits to private repo/s today.

Nickoladze2• 11 years ago

The dashboard doesn't show an activity feed anymore, just a giant list of projects? That's pretty lame.

jobvandervoort27• 11 years ago

Click 'Activity' for the Activity feed. We welcome feedback and contributions to improve this further.

This first step was necessary to clean up clutter in the UI.

Nickoladze2• 11 years ago

Thanks for the help, was just poking around preferences to see if I could enable it.

InsideTheBox2• 11 years ago

Nice!

At work we use self-hosted GitLab for everything.

Now I need a private repo (personal project) to deploy on my VPS, any opinions about GitLab vs Bitbucket for this use case? Speed, stability? I'm probably going to use Fabric this time.

jobvandervoort27• 11 years ago

Why Fabric over GitLab?

InsideTheBox2• 11 years ago

I mean GitLab/Bitbucket just for the private git repo. Fabric for tasks, atomic deploy (I think that's the word), etc. I'm only experienced with self-hosted, never used their services.

GitLab.com offers free unlimited (private) repositories and unlimited collaborators, please sign up or in on the right.

hackerboos• 11 years ago

Gitlab or Bitbucket aren't going to handle deploys for you.

You need gitlab-ci with the continuous deployment option.

For others: Fabric is a python project similar to Capistrano.

resca793• 11 years ago

This is my experience in GitLab application as developer. After my application I received an email like this:

The code you linked to is all quite basic, could you give me an example of some more complex Ruby code worked on, so that I can make an assessment of your ability in that regard.

There are many developers better that me, but I never say to other developers during an hiring process ' your code is all quite basic', it is not elegant. I have commits in ruby on rails framework but sure there are many developers better than me! But understand under the wood of a complex framework like rails is not very simple, for me :) Anyway I send some part of my last works and that was the response:

I have reviewed your application and regret to inform you that it has not been selected for further consideration, because I don't think your Ruby/Rails skill is currently at the level that we require.

Yes probably it's sure but maybe 'your skill do not fit with our requirements' or ' we're looking for an more experienced developer' ? I think that in two mails like that, there is a lot of arrogance that not match with open source mentality.

P.S. I think that gitlab is a great product, it's just my experience in application process.

rubiquity• 11 years ago

This is not the place to post this.

Fuxy• 11 years ago

Arrogance or honesty? I frankly prefer this direct response that gives you direct addressable things you can work on improving if you want to re-apply.

Your skills may be excellent but if you don't have anything complex to prove it with they can't figure that out.

resca793• 11 years ago

You're right. And I don't think that my skills are great. But there are many ways to say 'you are not good for this job' that's all

DouweM• 11 years ago

I’ve handled your application. I’m sorry you felt that you were not treated well during your application to GitLab. We set a very high level for our developers and do our best to maintain this. We try to communicate clearly to our applicants on what grounds we refuse their application. How would you prefer this to be handled instead?

quadrangle• 11 years ago

This is not appropriate post about the 8.0 announcement. But I'll give you this: any project with a CLA and a dual-version open / proprietary thing is not 100% in-line with ideal Open Source or Free Software values. I'll also give GitLab this: they've gone further than most would expect when pushed and have made sure their JavaScript is all Free/Libre/Open, and good for them. They could be better and they could be worse.

resca793• 11 years ago

There are many open source software that live in ambiguity, maybe for business/sponsorship reasons. I can figure out how it is hard to develop an open source project that needs a lot effort. But there is a base that you can lose, in open source company, the respect to people that send to you a Resumè, or want collaborate in your project

finalight• 11 years ago

time for me to upgrade!!

coder006• 11 years ago

Any free alternative to GitLab?

Gogs seems to be an option but it seems to be missing a very important feature of code review.

Redoubts• 11 years ago

GitLab is already free, in both senses.

uxp• 11 years ago

At my last job I left last week, we were looking for an alternative to the old GitHub/Jenkins setup, tried Stash/Bamboo for a while, but eventually settled on GitLab and GitLab CI (7.1x, with the Ruby-based CI runners) because the integrations with other services were already so mature. It took minimal customization to our Hubot to recreate our devops scripts and was really more of a drop-in replacement for what our Ruby shop needed. Although we eventually bought an Enterprise Edition license, we were still running the Community Edition (mostly because I left and just ran out of time to migrate), but were hardly lacking anything in the choice to stay on community until other more pressing migrations are dealt with (thanks first-gen Rackspace cloud).

If you're looking to centralize your devops infrastructure, I'd highly recommend GitLab over anything else unless you have a specific use case that GitLab isn't trying to solve (CF's BOSH, or a tighter integration with Atlasssian in a JVM shop for example).

radioact1ve• 11 years ago

I really like phabricator (http://phabricator.org/) with differential (https://phacility.com/phabricator/differential/)

cevn• 11 years ago

Looks good! One small typo: On the Pricing page https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/, instead of " Next-business day support" it should be "Next business day support".

sytse24• 11 years ago

Thanks cevn, fixed with https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/e23e5280...

dieseldeegs• 11 years ago

Congrats on the release! It looks amazing! We've been using GitLab for a little while now and love all the updates that have been coming out recently.

Doing the upgrade now though and have run into an issue with the rake command backup:show_secrets. ("Don't know how to build task...") Any ideas?

jobvandervoort27• 11 years ago

Thanks! That's nice to hear.

Can you create an issue with some more information (such as: what command did you run, what was the exact output, etc)?

If you're a subscriber, please email support :)

langolier• 11 years ago

See https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2660

Documentation seems to be ahead of current GitLab release. This failing task will be included in a following patch release, very soon.

uxcn2• 11 years ago

Wow, this looks really nice! Are there any plans to expand the CI? The markup looks mostly job oriented, so I think most of the semantics would seem to need to be captured in scripts. For example, building across multiple operating systems. Unless I'm mistaken, I'd have to have the hosts available via SSH, probably copy a script(s), and then call it, etc...

sytse24• 11 years ago

You can already define multiple jobs in .gitlab-ci.yml and use labels to assign them to runners (#debian, #osx etc.). We use GitLab CI to build our Omnibus packages and that is a multiple operating system affair (including Raspbian for the Raspberry Pi 2).

uxcn2• 11 years ago

Thanks, I appreciate the response. I started taking a look through the documentation and the CI looks pretty robust. I might try to set GitLab up at home soon.

I currently use hosted travis-ci for personal projects, which is nice since I don't have to worry about infrastructure, but it means there are things that can't be done with it. Generally stuff they haven't anticipated is verboten.

pymzor• 11 years ago

Awesome. Integrated CI is probably the move wich will make me move from gitHub.

sytse24• 11 years ago

Cool! Glad to hear you like the CI integration, we'll continue to improve it https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2594

sebastianconcpt• 11 years ago

I've flaslessly updated today. Looks awesome. I'm really grateful for such a good software product. Thanks for GitLab!

sytse24• 11 years ago

Glad to hear that, thanks for using GitLab!

ckok2• 11 years ago

Wow nice release, it's come miles since I used it years ago, very cool! The only thing I'm missing at this point to make it perfect is a more advanced issue tracker (coming from Phabricator)

jobvandervoort27• 11 years ago

We're working on it, among other things.

Concrete suggestions more than welcome on feedback.gitlab.com or here.

ckok2• 11 years ago

Our use case might be fairly specific, i don't know how others are using bugtrackers, but this is how and what we use in our bugtracker:

- Hooks (getting notified of changes in issues in http scripts)

- Api to modify them (couldn't find if gitlab has that), we use hooks, apis and custom fields to create issues from our forum and notify customers when one is closed/reopened.

- Custom fields (priority, severity, to store where an issue came from, like from our forum, from support, what the customers name is if any, if it's waiting, on what specific input, if it going to need documentation, and if so, what concerns there are)

- Custom open/close status like "Needs spec, specing, docs", close: "spam", "not fixable, testcase error" etc

- Sorting by more than 1 thing at a time, like due milestone, priority, severity)

- Filtering by pretty much all fields/custom fields like finding issues with specific open or closed states, specific categories, specific assignments

- Predefined filter/sorting queries (global/per user) so we'd have an "All issues assigned by me", "All new issues"

markdog12• 11 years ago

Updating broke my ci builds, :(

edit: following advice in this issue worked for me - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/issues/804

dman4• 11 years ago

Any chance of getting packages for Ubuntu 15.04?

There appears to be an open issue at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2160

sytse24• 11 years ago

Latest build should work, see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2160

dman4• 11 years ago

Thats the same ticket that I linked to and as far as I can see it does not provide any more information about the latest build. Perhaps you meant to include another link in your comment in the ticket?

dman4• 11 years ago

I tried following the instructions here https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/ but that doesnt work since there is no vivid package.

I did not follow the steps listed here - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/inst... since the text pretty strongly discourages a build from source. Specifically this line "Since an installation from source is a lot of work and error prone we strongly recommend the fast and reliable Omnibus package installation (deb/rpm)."

mrmondo2• 11 years ago

It doesn't look like there is any way to have per-receive hooks anymore: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/26

ksec• 11 years ago

I really wish Gitlab could create two entities. Gitlab.org and Gitlab.com

Much like how Wordpress is run. Gitlab.com's profits and revenue will be used to fund the continue development of Gitlab.org

For now the Gitlab.org part ( Or the open source development of Gitlab ) is fine. But Gitlab.com seems like a after thought. It should runs like Github, where you actually paid for Storage, Bandwidth etc for a price. Rather then the current price model which is for support only. This makes me feel Gitlab.com is more like a showcase of Gitlab, rather then a properly run services.

Some will bound to come to me, why dont you buy a VPS and set it yourself? Because i dont want the hassle. Should some day Gitlab close or company policy changes i will know there is always a open sources version where you can host it back on site.

It will also means those communities, or organization who refuse to host their code on Github due to lock in reason ( like Ruby ) can switch to Gitlab without ( ideally speaking ) the same hesitation.

sytse24• 11 years ago

Thanks for your suggestion.

I can assure you that our GitLab.com SaaS service is not an afterthought. It is growing so fast that we do have trouble keeping up with that, but we're hiring more people and things are looking up.

BTW We actually used .org and .com in the past for the community and the for-profit sites. We combined everything on .com because that removed a lot of duplication in announcements, information and many other things.

GitLab 8.0 released with new looks and integrated CI

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