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What is GitLab?

GitLab offers git repository management, code reviews, issue tracking, activity feeds and wikis. Enterprises install GitLab on-premise and connect it with LDAP and Active Directory servers for secure authentication and authorization. A single GitLab server can handle more than 25,000 users but it is also possible to create a high availability setup with multiple active servers.
GitLab is a tool in the Code Collaboration & Version Control category of a tech stack.

Who uses GitLab?

Companies
3459 companies reportedly use GitLab in their tech stacks, including GO-JEK, KAVAK, and Hepsiburada.

Developers
57026 developers on StackShare have stated that they use GitLab.

GitLab Integrations

Postman, Confluence, Sentry, BrowserStack, and GitLab CI are some of the popular tools that integrate with GitLab. Here's a list of all 217 tools that integrate with GitLab.
Pros of GitLab
508
Self hosted
431
Free
339
Has community edition
242
Easy setup
240
Familiar interface
137
Includes many features, including ci
113
Nice UI
84
Good integration with gitlabci
57
Simple setup
35
Has an official mobile app
34
Free private repository
31
Continuous Integration
23
Open source, great ui (like github)
18
Slack Integration
15
Full CI flow
11
Free and unlimited private git repos
10
All in one (Git, CI, Agile..)
10
User, group, and project access management is simple
8
Intuitive UI
8
Built-in CI
6
Full DevOps suite with Git
6
Both public and private Repositories
5
Integrated Docker Registry
5
So easy to use
5
CI
5
Build/pipeline definition alongside code
5
It's powerful source code management tool
4
Dockerized
4
It's fully integrated
4
On-premises
4
Security and Stable
4
Unlimited free repos & collaborators
4
Not Microsoft Owned
4
Excellent
4
Issue system
4
Mattermost Chat client
3
Great for team collaboration
3
Free private repos
3
Because is the best remote host for git repositories
3
Built-in Docker Registry
3
Opensource
3
Low maintenance cost due omnibus-deployment
3
I like the its runners and executors feature
2
Beautiful
2
Groups of groups
2
Multilingual interface
2
Powerful software planning and maintaining tools
2
Review Apps feature
2
Kubernetes integration with GitLab CI
2
One-click install through DigitalOcean
2
Powerful Continuous Integration System
2
It includes everything I need, all packaged with docker
2
The dashboard with deployed environments
2
HipChat intergration
2
Many private repo
2
Kubernetes Integration
2
Published IP list for whitelisting (gl-infra#434)
2
Wounderful
2
Native CI
1
Supports Radius/Ldap & Browser Code Edits
Decisions about GitLab

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose GitLab in their tech stack.

Russtopia Labs
Sr. Doodad Imagineer at Russtopia Labs · | 5 upvotes · 416.5K views
Shared insights

I installed Gogs after a few repos I planned to use on GitHub disappeared without explanation, and after Microsoft's acquisition of same, it made me think about the over-centralization of community-developed software. A self-hosted solution that enables easy point-and-click mirroring of important repositories for my projects, both in-house and 3rd-party, ensures I won't be bitten by upstream catastrophes. (So far, Microsoft's stewardship has been fine, but always be prepared). It's also a very nice way to host one's own private repos before they're ready for prime-time on github.

Gogs is written in Go and is easy to install and configure, IMHO much more so than GitLab, though it's of course less feature-rich; the only major feature I wish Gogs had is an integrated code review tool, but the web plugin hypothes.is https://stackshare.io/hypothes-is/hypothes-is is quite suitable as a code review tool. Set up a group for each code review, and just highlight lines to add comments in pull request pages of Gogs.

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Joshua Dean Küpper
CEO at Scrayos UG (haftungsbeschränkt) · | 20 upvotes · 710.8K views

We use GitLab CI because of the great native integration as a part of the GitLab framework and the linting-capabilities it offers. The visualization of complex pipelines and the embedding within the project overview made Gitlab CI even more convenient. We use it for all projects, all deployments and as a part of GitLab Pages.

While we initially used the Shell-executor, we quickly switched to the Docker-executor and use it exclusively now.

We formerly used Jenkins but preferred to handle everything within GitLab . Aside from the unification of our infrastructure another motivation was the "configuration-in-file"-approach, that Gitlab CI offered, while Jenkins support of this concept was very limited and users had to resort to using the webinterface. Since the file is included within the repository, it is also version controlled, which was a huge plus for us.

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Joshua Dean Küpper
CEO at Scrayos UG (haftungsbeschränkt) · | 11 upvotes · 669.3K views

We primarily use MariaDB but use PostgreSQL as a part of GitLab , Sentry and Nextcloud , which (initially) forced us to use it anyways. While this isn't much of a decision – because we didn't have one (ha ha) – we learned to love the perks and advantages of PostgreSQL anyways. PostgreSQL's extension system makes it even more flexible than a lot of the other SQL-based DBs (that only offer stored procedures) and the additional JOIN options, the enhanced role management and the different authentication options came in really handy, when doing manual maintenance on the databases.

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Joshua Dean Küpper
CEO at Scrayos UG (haftungsbeschränkt) · | 10 upvotes · 312.9K views

We use Sonatype Nexus to store our closed-source java libraries to simplify our deployment and dependency-management. While there are many alternatives, most of them are expensive ( GitLab Enterprise ), monilithic ( JFrog Artifactory ) or only offer SaaS-licences. We preferred the on-premise approach of Nexus and therefore decided to use it.

We exclusively use the Maven-capabilities and are glad that the modular design of Nexus allows us to run it very lightweight.

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Yogesh Bhondekar
Product Manager | SaaS | Traveller · | 15 upvotes · 430.9K views
Needs advice
on
DockerDockerMongoDBMongoDB
and
RabbitMQRabbitMQ

Hi, I am building an enhanced web-conferencing app that will have a voice/video call, live chats, live notifications, live discussions, screen sharing, etc features. Ref: Zoom.

I need advise finalizing the tech stack for this app. I am considering below tech stack:

  • Frontend: React
  • Backend: Node.js
  • Database: MongoDB
  • IAAS: #AWS
  • Containers & Orchestration: Docker / Kubernetes
  • DevOps: GitLab, Terraform
  • Brokers: Redis / RabbitMQ

I need advice at the platform level as to what could be considered to support concurrent video streaming seamlessly.

Also, please suggest what could be a better tech stack for my app?

#SAAS #VideoConferencing #WebAndVideoConferencing #zoom #stack

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pramod shirsath
Founder at Supra Software Solutions · | 6 upvotes · 43.2K views

We are an application development firm helping our customers develop web & mobile application. We are currently using GitLab for CI/CT/CD. However, we are looking for something more modern, advance & futuristic that will still be in use even after 10 years of supporting the latest technologies/servers of the time. Someone mentioned about Terraform. Any thoughts about which one would be right one to adopt or just continue with Gitlab?

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Blog Posts

GitLab's Features

  • Manage git repositories with fine grained access controls that keep your code secure
  • Perform code reviews and enhance collaboration with merge requests
  • Each project can also have an issue tracker and a wiki
  • Used by more than 100,000 organizations, GitLab is the most popular solution to manage git repositories on-premises
  • Completely free and open source (MIT Expat license)
  • Powered by Ruby on Rails

GitLab Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to GitLab?
GitHub
GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.
Bitbucket
Bitbucket gives teams one place to plan projects, collaborate on code, test and deploy, all with free private Git repositories. Teams choose Bitbucket because it has a superior Jira integration, built-in CI/CD, & is free for up to 5 users.
Jenkins
In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.
Gogs
The goal of this project is to make the easiest, fastest and most painless way to set up a self-hosted Git service. With Go, this can be done in independent binary distribution across ALL platforms that Go supports, including Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
See all alternatives

GitLab's Followers
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