
GitLab 8.3 released with Auto-merge and GitLab Pages - doppp
https://about.gitlab.com/2015/12/22/gitlab-8-3-released/
======
VeilEm
Phabricator[0] is a more mature alternative if anyone is interested in an open
source and free substitute for GitHub. I think the only thing GitLab might
have over Phabricator is a familiar GitHub like UI. Phabricator was an
internal Facebook project that was open sourced. It's actually far more than
just a substitute for GitHub. It has a much better system for managing issues,
and better code review tools as well as other powerful features. My favorite
feature is the herald system[1].

[0] [http://phabricator.org/](http://phabricator.org/)

[1]
[https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/hera...](https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/herald/)

~~~
dham
I just can't get into Phabricator. Babel switched to it for issues. I find it
hard finding anything. I kind of wish they would mirror the issues on to
Github.

When I see Phabricator I just don't see anything. I just see a blob of text
dumped to the screen. Maybe it's because I'm so use to Github.

~~~
sdesol
No it's not just you. I find it hard to explain but GitHub does have the right
amount of white/empty space to make consumption of information easier. I've
always hated the simplicity of GitHub's layout, but after studying their
commits and branches pages for my product, I've grown to appreciate their
simplicity.

It's the little things that GitHub does, that I've found makes the difference.
Take GitLab's branches page here:

[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/branches](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
org/gitlab-ce/branches)

vs

[https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/branches](https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/branches)

By limiting the number of branches shown and by creating strong visual
breaks/barriers, they make it way easier for the user to focus. Seeing a wall
of branches is okay ... when that's what you want, but as a default, by
organizing it the way that GitHub does, they make their branches page
significantly easier to consume.

I also find the buttons too be a little too big in GitLab and they don't have
enough definition to them, to help you focus on them. Creating merge requests
and comparing branches is the focal point of the branches page, and they
should make it easier for your eyes to lock onto them.

Like I said, it's the little things that I can't explain that I've come to
respect and I don't think it's just because we are familar with GitHub.

~~~
slavik81
We used GitLab for a few months, until we could get spending approval for
Github.

The switch was surprisingly controversial, as the GitLab network view was
apparently much more useful than the Github network view.

~~~
sdesol
I don't disagree with GitLab's network view being more useful. People also
shouldn't assume GitHub isn't fallible with their decisions. The fact that it
took, I don't know how many years for them to implement side by side diffs is
living proof of this.

GitLab just needs to work on the little things and they can really be
disruptive to GitHub's business.

Another little change that I think would go a long way, is changing the folder
icon. I don't know why, but the round corners in the folder icon really irks
me. There is also something off about the font that they are using. I think
it's just too thick, but I can't really put my finger on it.

------
Svenskunganka
I've been using GitLab before, and use it from time-to-time still, but I've
moved over to a self-hosted Gogs[0] server with Drone CI[1]. Both projects are
actively maintained and both runs super well in Docker. Gogs is almost an
identical clone of GitHub, although some small parts are missing but will most
definitely be added in an upcoming version.

Gogs is a lot more lightweight and faster than GitLab is. Our previous GitLab
instance (7.X version range) used over 1.7GB of RAM (roughly 15 repos with 3
users) and always took longer than 1 second to serve a request (commit
browsing was really bad, >5 seconds to serve such a request) while our Gogs
installation uses 15MB and always serve requests sub-second. Both ran on the
same hardware, with RAID10 SSDs. Definitely worth checking out if you want a
self-hosted, lightweight & performant Git remote solution.

Drone officially supports Gogs as well, so that's nice.

[0] [https://github.com/gogits/gogs/](https://github.com/gogits/gogs/)

[1] [https://github.com/drone/drone](https://github.com/drone/drone)

~~~
sytse
Just wanted to add that we're working hard to bring down the request time in
GitLab 8.x. We're not there yet but already optimized a lot of SQL queries and
this release added support for better comment caching to prevent markdown
parsing. Edit: we had to revert the comment caching at the last minute due to
a bug but we're working on that, many other improvements and performance
monitoring with InFluxDB and Grafana

~~~
lhecker
I can definitely confirm that somewhere around the 8.0 release (I forgot when
exactly) GitLab got _a lot_ faster in general. Previously with the 7.x line it
took about a couple seconds at least to load a page but now I barely get over
a second until "onload", with response times of about 400ms.

In general I wouldn't consider performance with GitLab an issue and denote it
as a selling point for Gogs anymore - it would just be nice if it no longer
felt like a Ruby on Rails website...

A optimized site of mine with similiar complexity and database setup has a
response time of 16ms and an "onload" event after about 400ms (using PHP-FPM 7
& MariaDB). ;)

~~~
sytse
Glad to hear performance got better in 8.x. What can we improve to make it
feel better?

~~~
tiku
Less memory usage.. I went from gitlab to gogs because of that.. 2gb usage
while idle..

~~~
sytse
Thanks, we're working towards a multithreaded application server to reduce
memory usage [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/3592](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3592)

------
ozborn
I'm a huge fan of Gitlab and use it at my workplace, but haven't upgraded to
even 8.0 to try the continuous integration (CI) feature. Wikipedia makes it
look pretty comparable on features to more mature CI system like Jenkins but
can anybody here say how the current CI in Gitlab 8.x really compares?

~~~
xrstf
[We're running a Gitlab instance and one CI instance with multiple CI runners
in the Google Cloud.]

Gitlab CI is great if you don't need dynamically provisioned build slaves, for
which I found no integrated support. In general, Gitlab CI is _much_ more
straightforward and easy to use than Jenkins.

Jenkins wins when it comes to stuff like build artifacts (getting these out of
Jenkins is easy peasy (just wget them and provide basic HTTP auth if needed),
but with GitLab I have not yet found a way to automatically download say the
latest build results), credentials management and other "more enterprisey"
features.

Jenkins is easy to install on Debian-based systems; I have no real experience
in setting up Gitlab other than via the official Docker images, which is
nearly as easy as typing `apt-get install jenkins`. Setting up CI
runners/instances is easy as well (apt-get install + one or two calls to
gitlab-multi-runner).

Overall I'm pretty happy with Gitlab CI. Especially the fact that every
developer in our company can take advantage of automated builds by just
enabling CI support and putting a .gitlab-ci.yml in the repository is great.
Over are the days were admins had to manage Jenkins jobs.

~~~
halfdan
Artifacts:
[http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/ci/yaml/README.html#artifacts](http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/ci/yaml/README.html#artifacts)

~~~
DanielDent
Getting artifacts _into_ gitlab CI is pretty straightforward.

But programatically pulling artifacts _from_ gitlab CI does not seem to have a
well-documented approach.

~~~
sytse
We're working on an artifact browser for 8.4. I assume an API for that will be
trivial after that has landed.

~~~
sytse
You can follow the work in this in [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/3426](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3426)

~~~
mijoharas
I gotta say, this is one of the killer features (for me) of gitlab. It's very
actively maintained and constantly improving. (Nice to see that Mattermost is
included automatically too, gonna have to enable that later and mess about
with it!)

------
tedmiston
My startup has been using GitLab Community Edition for 3 years now and we're
really happy with it -- especially the code review features. We've also
started using the CI in the past few months.

At this point I want a similar setup for my personal projects, but didn't feel
like running a dedicated EC2 box just for a GitLab instance, so I've been
using Bitbucket to host free private repos instead. What are others using to
manage their own private repos?

Edit: I wasn't aware GitLab.com offers free private repos too. Even if, "Right
now GitLab.com is really slow and frequently down."

[https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/)

~~~
wredej
Disclosure: I work at GitLab. Have you looked at using our free hosted SaaS
GitLab.com with unlimited repos and collaborators? Thanks for using CE!

~~~
tedmiston
Thank you! Somehow I completely overlooked that page.

Can you elaborate on the monthly uptime in reference to the quote on the
GitLab.com page?

> Right now GitLab.com is really slow and frequently down.

~~~
frik
[https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus](https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus) on
[https://status.gitlab.com](https://status.gitlab.com) mentions _Azure_ cloud
several times.

    
    
      "The rsync to *Azure* SSD got interrupted last night 
      when we had an outage. Restarting it now." - 18th Dec
    
      "This means service will partially restore over the next
      few minutes and then go away again once the *Azure* 
      restart command succeeds." 
    
      "Looks like we are headed for the ‘double restart’ 
      scenario. The NFS server came back on its own but 
      *Azure* is still busy restarting it."
    
      "*Azure* restart of the NFS server is in progress"
    
      "Depending on whether the machine is stuck or already 
      rebooting. No way to tell with *Azure*."
    
      "*Azure* CLI restart of the NFS server finished, that is 
      usually a good sign."
    
      "We are experimenting with copying data out of our 
      current *Azure* storage account. Unfortunately the 
      copying affects http://gitlab.com" - 1st Dez
    
      "Azure incident quote: Network Infrastructure and 
      Storage - East US 2 - Partial Service Interruption 
      [East US 2]" - 11. Nov
    
      "Seems to be a major @azure outage..." - 11th Nov
    
      "At 18:00UTC we will start migrating PostgreSQL to Azure 
      Premium Storage gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ope… , expect 15 
      minutes downtime." - 10. Nov
    
      "trying another Azure restart of the NFS server " - 6th Nov
    
      "In the last 24h, we had two reboots of our Redis server 
      seemingly caused by Azure (no kernel panics) and VHD 
      read errors on the NFS server" - 5th Nov
    
      "Azure are sponsoring us so we are saving a lot on our 
      hosting bill. We are documenting the move on an upcoming 
      blog post." - 16th Oct
    

There have appearently been really big troubles, starting in November! Is
Azure cloud that bad or is it a problem on your side? What about moving to
AWS/Google/Rackspace?

~~~
sytse
We moving to metal on Softlayer. See [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
com/operations/issues/14](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/14)

~~~
frik
Thanks for the info. All the best with the transition to IBM Softlayer.

~~~
sytse
Thanks!

------
nalck
GitLab has a fine interface and offers free private repositories. If it
weren't for GitHub's network effect advantage, I'd use it for all my git
projects.

~~~
x1024
What's the "Network effect" for private repos?

~~~
dajohnson89
I'd imagine the network effect is non-existent for private repos, but for
public repos it's huge. And then there's the issue of switching between Gitlab
and Github for private/public projects.

~~~
nalck
That's essentially it. GitHub has won its role as the (meta)repository of
public record. I suspect many stick with it over its competitors for this very
reason.

------
drinchev
Congrats on the team.

I'm reading the comments on HN and top comments are suggesting competitor
products that fix mostly speed and UI concerns.

I've been following GitLab since 3 years it was really cool to host my own
GitHub ( back then the design was almost identical ), but now it becomes more
obvious how important it is to choose a language before you build a web
application.

I think the ruby part was the only bad thing that they shouldn't have copied
from GitHub. Also I bet you just can't use a web-app as big as gitlab on your
own DO 10$ box and don't have any problems very soon.

If I was part of GitLab team I would definitely put on the table a plan to
decentralise the services from their main ruby repository and use something
modern micro-service based solution with it's top performant language.

~~~
sytse
A $10 DO box should run GitLab fine for a couple of people. Many of the speed
concerns are about GitLab.com which are not due to ruby but the file server
(we just moved to SSD and are working on decentralized storage). To make
GitLab faster we're using Go were it makes sense, see the part about workhorse
in the release announcement. We're very happy with using Ruby and Rails for
the complex business logic. It allows us to ship many new features every
month.

We had CI as a separate application but it ended up being better to integrate
it.

------
wegwerf42
Another plug:

[https://github.com/jstimpfle/gitadmin](https://github.com/jstimpfle/gitadmin)

It's a small auth layer with only a command-line interface (usually used over
SSH). Single python script without fancy dependencies. Used at the university
department where I sysadmin.

It can be tested locally with super simple setup (just call once with --init
to create a basedirectory). I'm grateful for feedback.

------
chappi42
title should be: ... and Gitlab Page (EE only!)

They do so many good thing thus it's hard to complain. But Pages-EE-only makes
no sense imho. The blog post even mentions open source projects needing a
static web page. But do (small) oss projects have the funding to buy into EE?

A quick integrated project website could be especially helpful for smaller
projects were one doesn't want to setup a proper site.

~~~
sytse
GitLab.com runs EE so you can set up a free site there. We have free shared
runners too so you don't have to configure a thing. I set it up yesterday for
Sytse.com (with a redirect, cname support coming next month)

~~~
chappi42
Thanks for replying. gitlab.com is not an option in my case a.o. reasons due
to ci testing (which btw is supergreat in 8.x!!). But this pages ee is the
first time i think gl did 'wrong'. Not really 'core-essential', but a pity.

~~~
sytse
Why can't you use GitLab.com with CI? You can bring your own runners if you
want.

~~~
chappi42
Missed that, in this case it should work.

~~~
sytse
Great!

------
mrslave
All I want is a Kanban board. It seems I have to fork out $$$ for JIRA. :(

~~~
sytse
Please see [https://about.gitlab.com/applications/#scrum-
boards](https://about.gitlab.com/applications/#scrum-boards) for the options
with GitLab. There is also work done to redeem a bounty for GitLab support in
Huboard.

~~~
mrslave
Thanks. I should have mentioned that I have seen that. I tried GitLab Kanban,
thinking the product created by the same organization as GitLab would be the
best. I was dissatisfied at installation time (uses Docker, in contrast to the
RPMs provided for GitLab CE) and stopped there.

Must be hosted locally for boring corporate reasons.

~~~
sytse
Thanks for the feedback. We're considering bundling a kanban board into the
GitLab Omnibus packages to make it easier to install, see "Software to ship in
the Omnibus packages" on
[https://about.gitlab.com/direction/](https://about.gitlab.com/direction/)

------
infocollector
Anyone knows if there are plans to support hg-git and hg on Gitlab?

~~~
jordigh
You don't need any special support on the gitlab side for hg-git, since that's
all client side.

It would be awesome if they had hg support, but I assume it would require too
much. Kallithea is supposed to be the one with hg support, but hmmmmm....
maybe it wouldn't be so much work to put hg support into gitlab instead. I'll
have a look sometime.

~~~
infocollector
That is what I thought, till I tried to clone a git repo using hg-git
interface. Don't remember the error I got, but that did not work for me. Maybe
someone here has experience making this combination work?

------
dujiulun2006
_GitLab Pages (EE only)_

That's it. I'm pirating GitLab EE.

------
dang
Url changed from [http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/22/gitlab-just-launched-
anoth...](http://venturebeat.com/2015/12/22/gitlab-just-launched-another-
feature-that-will-help-it-compete-with-github/), which points to this.

~~~
sytse
Thanks dang!

