User Docs (FREE)

Welcome to GitLab! We're glad to have you here!

As a GitLab user you have access to all the features your subscription includes, except GitLab administrator settings, unless you have admin privileges to install, configure, and upgrade your GitLab instance.

Admin privileges for GitLab.com are restricted to the GitLab team.

For more information on configuring GitLab self-managed instances, see the Administrator documentation.

Overview

GitLab is a fully integrated software development platform that enables your team to be transparent, fast, effective, and cohesive from discussion on a new idea to production, all on the same platform.

For more information, see All GitLab Features.

Concepts

To get familiar with the concepts needed to develop code on GitLab, read the following articles:

Use cases

GitLab is a Git-based platform that integrates a great number of essential tools for software development and deployment, and project management:

With GitLab Enterprise Edition, you can also:

You can also integrate GitLab with numerous third-party applications, such as Mattermost, Microsoft Teams, Trello, Slack, Bamboo CI, Jira, and a lot more.

User types

There are several types of users in GitLab:

User activity

You can follow or unfollow other users from their user profiles. To view a user's activity in a top-level Activity view:

  1. From a user's profile, select Follow.
  2. In the GitLab menu, select Activity.
  3. Select the Followed users tab.

Projects

In GitLab, you can create projects to host your code, track issues, collaborate on code, and continuously build, test, and deploy your app with built-in GitLab CI/CD. Or, you can do it all at once, from one single project.

  • Repositories: Host your codebase in repositories with version control and as part of a fully integrated platform.
  • Issues: Explore the best of GitLab Issues' features.
  • Merge Requests: Collaborate on code, reviews, live preview changes per branch, and request approvals with Merge Requests.
  • Milestones: Work on multiple issues and merge requests towards the same target date with Milestones.

Account

There is a lot you can customize and configure to enjoy the best of GitLab.

  • Settings: Manage your user settings to change your personal information, personal access tokens, authorized applications, etc.
  • Authentication: Read through the authentication methods available in GitLab.
  • Permissions: Learn the different set of permissions levels for each user type (guest, reporter, developer, maintainer, owner).
  • Feature highlight: Learn more about the little blue dots around the app that explain certain features.
  • Abuse reports: Report abuse from users to GitLab administrators.

Groups

With GitLab Groups you can assemble related projects together and grant members access to several projects at once.

Groups can also be nested in subgroups.

Discussions

In GitLab, you can comment and mention collaborators in issues, merge requests, code snippets, and commits.

When performing inline reviews to implementations to your codebase through merge requests you can gather feedback through resolvable threads.

GitLab Flavored Markdown (GFM)

Read through the GFM documentation to learn how to apply the best of GitLab Flavored Markdown in your threads, comments, issues and merge requests descriptions, and everywhere else GFM is supported.

To-Do List

Never forget to reply to your collaborators. GitLab To-Do List is a tool for working faster and more effectively with your team, by listing all user or group mentions, as well as issues and merge requests you're assigned to.

Search

Search and filter through groups, projects, issues, merge requests, files, code, and more.

Snippets

Snippets are code blocks that you want to store in GitLab, from which you have quick access to. You can also gather feedback on them through Discussions.

GitLab CI/CD

Use built-in GitLab CI/CD to test, build, and deploy your applications directly from GitLab. No third-party integrations needed.

Features behind feature flags

Understand what features behind feature flags mean.

Keyboard shortcuts

There are many keyboard shortcuts in GitLab to help you navigate between pages and accomplish tasks faster.

Integrations

Integrate GitLab with your preferred tool, such as Trello, Jira, etc.

Webhooks

Configure webhooks to listen for specific events like pushes, issues or merge requests. GitLab sends a POST request with data to the webhook URL.

API

Automate GitLab via API.

Git and GitLab

Learn what is Git and its best practices.

Instance-level analytics

See various statistics of your GitLab instance.

Operations Dashboard

See Operations Dashboard for a summary of each project's operational health.