Projects

In GitLab, you can create projects for hosting your codebase, use it as an issue tracker, collaborate on code, and continuously build, test, and deploy your app with built-in GitLab CI/CD.

Your projects can be available publicly, internally, or privately, at your choice. GitLab does not limit the number of private projects you create.

Project's features

When you create a project in GitLab, you'll have access to a large number of features:

Issues and merge requests:

• Issue tracker: Discuss implementations with your team within issues
  • Issue Boards: Organize and prioritize your workflow
  • Multiple Issue Boards (Starter/Premium): Allow your teams to create their own workflows (Issue Boards) for the same project
• Repositories: Host your code in a fully integrated platform
  • Branches: use Git branching strategies to collaborate on code
  • Protected branches: Prevent collaborators from messing with history or pushing code without review
  • Protected tags: Control over who has permission to create tags, and prevent accidental update or deletion
  • Signing commits: use GPG to sign your commits
• Merge Requests: Apply your branching strategy and get reviewed by your team
  • Merge Request Approvals (Starter/Premium): Ask for approval before implementing a change
  • Fix merge conflicts from the UI: Your Git diff tool right from GitLab's UI
  • Review Apps: Live preview the results of the changes proposed in a merge request in a per-branch basis
• Labels: Organize issues and merge requests by labels
• Time Tracking: Track estimate time and time spent on the conclusion of an issue or merge request
• Milestones: Work towards a target date
• Description templates: Define context-specific templates for issue and merge request description fields for your project
• Slash commands (quick actions): Textual shortcuts for common actions on issues or merge requests

GitLab CI/CD:

• GitLab CI/CD: GitLab's built-in Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment tool
  • Container Registry: Build and push Docker images out-of-the-box
  • Auto Deploy: Configure GitLab CI/CD to automatically set up your app's deployment
  • Enable and disable GitLab CI
  • Pipelines: Configure and visualize your GitLab CI/CD pipelines from the UI
    • Scheduled Pipelines: Schedule a pipeline to start at a chosen time
    • Pipeline Graphs: View your entire pipeline from the UI
    • Job artifacts: Define, browse, and download job artifacts
    • Pipeline settings: Set up Git strategy (choose the default way your repository is fetched from GitLab in a job), timeout (defines the maximum amount of time in minutes that a job is able run), custom path for .gitlab-ci.yml, test coverage parsing, pipeline's visibility, and much more
  • GKE cluster integration: Connecting your GitLab project with Google Kubernetes Engine
• GitLab Pages: Build, test, and deploy your static website with GitLab Pages

Other features:

• Cycle Analytics: Review your development lifecycle
• Syntax highlighting: An alternative to customize your code blocks, overriding GitLab's default choice of language

Project's integrations

Integrate your project with Jira, Mattermost, Kubernetes, Slack, and a lot more.

New project

Learn how to create a new project in GitLab.

Fork a project

You can fork a project in order to:

• Collaborate on code by forking a project and creating a merge request from your fork to the upstream project
• Fork a sample project to work on the top of that

Project settings

Set the project's visibility level and the access levels to its various pages and perform actions like archiving, renaming or transferring a project.

Read through the documentation on project settings.

Import or export a project

• Import a project from:
  • GitHub to GitLab
  • BitBucket to GitLab
  • Gitea to GitLab
  • FogBugz to GitLab
• Export a project from GitLab
• Importing and exporting projects between GitLab instances

Project's members

Learn how to add members to your projects.

Leave a project

Leave project will only display on the project's dashboard when a project is part of a group (under a group namespace). If you choose to leave a project you will no longer be a project member, therefore, unable to contribute.

Redirects when changing repository paths

When a repository path changes, it is essential to smoothly transition from the old location to the new one. GitLab provides two kinds of redirects: the web UI and Git push/pull redirects.

Depending on the situation, different things apply.

When renaming a user or changing a group path:

• The redirect to the new URL is permanent, which means that the original namespace can't be claimed again by any group or user.
• Existing web URLs for the namespace and anything under it (e.g., projects) will redirect to the new URLs.
• Starting with GitLab 10.3, existing Git remote URLs for projects under the namespace will redirect to the new remote URL. Every time you push/pull to a repository that has changed its location, a warning message to update your remote will be displayed instead of rejecting your action. This means that any automation scripts, or Git clients will continue to work after a rename, making any transition a lot smoother. To avoid pulling from or pushing to an entirely incorrect repository, the old path will be reserved.

When renaming-a-repository, the same things apply, except for the Git push/pull actions which will be rejected with a warning message to change to the new remote URL.