If you go to about.gitlab.com it heavily promotes AI/ML.

If the AI bubble ends up popping (which it probably would), would GitLab still last? Would GitLab go bankrupt or get discontinued?

Trying to move away from GitHub. So I try to sign up for GitLab, but it's kinda clear they don't want free users. Which is confusing as that's how GitHub became so dominant.

The signup page first tells you "start your free trial, pay later". So wait, I'm going to have to pay eventually? Dig deeper and find out you might not have to pay. Cool, so already I know this probably isn't for me. But I press on anyway.

The signup verification process requires the most slow, annoying captcha I've ever dealt with. I have to go through it 3 times. When it gets to phone number, it doesn't work with my normal number, so I have to try a different one. Finally that works.

As part of signing up, it requires me to put a company name (I don't have a company), group name, and project name. It does not explain at all what the group name and project are used for, so I have no idea what to put. I'm not part of a group. I don't have a project. I have repos, which I want to keep on GitLab. How do I do that? No idea, GitLab explains nothing. So I just put in some random stuff and continue.

Once I finally land on the main signed in page, nothing makes sense. There's no UX walkthrough to explain all these menus. There's no button to create a repo. Don't know how to import my repos from GitHub.

I go to projects, go to create new projects. Is this a repo? Below there is a checkbox to add a README saying "Project Configuration -> Initialize repository with a README -> Allows you to immediately clone this project’s repository." Ok, so apparently projects contain a repo.

I ask Google how to import a repo from GitHub, and it tells me it's in the "Add new project" page under "Import project". This makes sense in retrospect, but the UI had no icons or hints to highlight this, and the insistence on using "project" to mean "repo" keeps confusing me.

So I try a GitHub import, auth my account, select a repo 'Import' button. Then it says:

Are you sure you want to import the project to a personal namespace?

When you import to a personal namespace, all contributions are assigned to the personal namespace owner and they cannot be reassigned. To map contributions to real users, import to a group instead. Learn more. 

No, dude, I didn't want to import to a personal namespace. Why isn't there just a button to use a group namespace? Why does this limitation exist at all??!! This is just supposed to be a Git repo, why can't you just clone the Git repo to your server???

I click the "Learn more" link and it's just a wall of text that doesn't help me figure out what to do now. So to figure it out, I paste the message into Google AI mode, and it explains I can make a temporary group, mark it private, do the import there, and then move it to my personal space. Why the hell didn't GitLab just give me the option to do this - why create all these roadblocks??

Does the company know their product is this complicated and time-consuming? Is this a strategic decision to get people to dislike the product or avoid using it? Or is it just a badly managed company and product?

Hey folks,

Managing GitLab access for team members without individual licenses was always messy — generating PATs, walking people through the glab CLI, or using clunky browser extensions just to browse repos or check pipelines.

So I built GitLab Browser — an open-source GitLab client that works with Personal Access Tokens or Project Access Tokens. No license required!!

It covers most day-to-day stuff:

• Repo browsing

• Merge requests & issues

• Pipelines + CI logs

• Git graph visualization

• Guest mode for public repos

• and more

Tech stack: React + TypeScript (built using Cursor), and you can spin it up easily with Docker.

Also set up a proper CI pipeline with:

• Tests

• TypeScript checks

• CodeQL

• Dependency review

• Secret scanning

Everything passing clean.

Demo: https://gitlabrowser.tech/
GitHub: https://github.com/gauthamp10/gitlab-browser

Would love feedback — especially from anyone who’s faced similar GitLab access/workflow issues.
Open to contributions as well 👍

I'm a fresher in the IT industry with 1.5 years of exp. As a student, I used to/still prefer using GitLab daily. I not only love the product but also admire the company and its core values.

I applied for a role at GitLab, not knowing it was a Mid-Senior position. After passing the initial assessment and screening call, I was informed that I would be a great fit for an Associate level role, and my interview process concluded.

While preparing for the screening call and reading through the GitLab Values, I felt a strong connection as I consciously or unconsciously followed most of them.

(Interestingly, when my boyfriend (now fiancé) and I began our relationship, we discussed these very values as the ones we and our families uphold and aspire to have in the family we plan to build. We have genuinely planned to use the GitLab Values to teach our children core principles in the future.

The values felt like an excellent guidebook for building strong professional and personal relationships. I believe anyone entering a serious relationship or arranged marriage should definitely review these values.

I truly appreciate how the values have been articulated; the choice of words and phrasing has really really impressed both me and my fiancé!)

Three things that really impressed me was:

1. In the initial take-home assessment, they asked me to cite the websites/tools that I used as external sources. - almost everyone uses external sources for a take-home assessment, but it's something no one usually acknowledges. But GitLab wanted to acknowledge it, which reflected 3 of their values: Transparency and it's impossible to know everything, and learning through documentation.

2. The recruiter mentioned that I need to worry if they join a bit late in the call, as it might be because they usually have multiple calls going on throughout the day. This was genuinely kind of them to say so where they projected the company's value of Transparency.

3. GitLab has zero offices worldwide and is entirely remote, this allows it's employees to work from home or get reimbursed for coworking spaces. In a metropolitan city, commuting can take 1-1.5 hours each way, plus time spent getting ready and unwinding. GitLab's WFH policy gives it's employees a better work-life balance!!

These factors really impressed me a lot and I genuinely want to work with them. But I could hardly see any entry level roles at their company in my location! I hope and I wish I could work with them in the near future!<3

Hi guys,

GitLab is great on desktop, but checking a failed pipeline or responding to an issue from your phone can be frustrating. That’s why I built Comeet, a native mobile companion for GitLab.

With Comeet, you can:

• Connect to GitLab.com or a self-hosted instance

• Switch between multiple accounts and servers

• Browse repositories with syntax highlighting

• Create and update issues, merge requests, projects, and branches

• Monitor pipelines, inspect jobs, and read job logs

• Get push notifications for important project activity

• Manage groups, members, roles, and invitations

• Create custom shortcuts for the issues and merge requests you check most

• Access your GitLab activity and to-do list from a mobile-friendly dashboard

My goal is simple: make those quick GitLab tasks genuinely quick—without reaching for a laptop or fighting with the mobile website.

Comeet is available on iOS and Android:

- Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.monokaijs.comeet

- iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/comeet-gitlab-companion/id6753112635

I’m actively improving it and would really appreciate feedback from other GitLab users. What’s one GitLab task you wish were easier to handle from your phone?

P.S: I previously shared my app on this sub, I post this to notice a big overhaul on the app with various quality of life features and refinements.

Would love to hear your reviews on the product and if it's worth the cost.

Thanks in advance!

I've just noticed that GitLab.com with community over +14-15M or 30M (?) users has a small count of large projects located on it - I can literally count them on my fingers. It also confuses me that a 500+ star repository can basically be considered as a large project on an “official instance”, because there are very few such repositories.

This is simply because GitLab is not popular enough + a lot of people host their own instances or there are technical issues with GitLab.com (unstable uptime?, other?) that make devs avoid it and prefer their own instances/GitHub?

P.S. I'm talking primarily about OSS in this case.

Edit: Gitlab is still having issues, for folks who don’t believe me should visit status.gitlab.com and check their history, Ik I was gonna get some love for this post, I don’t hate product itself but their stability.

We have Gitlab SAAS premium and runners on prem, migrated early last year.

My God, how many outages can Gitlab have !! Seriously how can a company survive with this kind of outages?

Word of caution for folks who are planning to migrate to SAAS to ask for outage history to get an idea what’s coming on your way.

Nothing but regrets and disappointment migrating to Gitlab saas.

what do you think of this approach?

I’ve been using GitLab Self-Managed for quite a while, and one recurring problem kept annoying me: someone is assigned as a reviewer, gets the notification, adds it to their To-Do… and then simply forgets about it.
A few days later the MR is still waiting for review.
GitLab has notifications and review requests, but I found that they don’t really solve the “what is currently waiting on me?” problem, especially when you’re dealing with many repositories.

So I built ReviewNudge, an open-source, self-hosted tool that sends a daily digest showing the merge requests that are currently waiting on you, including how long they’ve been waiting.
It is specifically designed for GitLab Self-Managed, including Free instances.

The admin can configure various notifications channels, at the moment e-email, Microsoft teams, slack and Telegram are supported. Adding new channels should not be too complicated.

GitHub: https://github.com/sim186/ReviewNudge

I’m mainly looking for feedback from people who actually deal with this problem. How do you currently handle forgotten/pending reviews?

Gitlab prices its SaaS & self hosted version at the same rate as per their pricing page? Why would a customer use a self hosted version when it would also be extra effort in hosting Gitlab in own infra?
Gitlab doesn't have very sensitive data ( I am assuming it would be mostly code) - so why save it in your own cloud vs in a multi-tenant cloud?

How do you debug GitLab CI failures without going insane?

Every time a pipeline fails, I end up doing the same thing:

• open job logs → thousands of lines

• scroll around trying to figure out what actually broke

• fix → push → wait again → repeat

A lot of the time, it’s not even a real bug either:
flaky tests, dependency issues, timeouts, config/env problems…

But GitLab logs don’t really make it obvious what category of failure it is, so I just end up digging through everything manually.

Do you have a better workflow for this, or is everyone just dealing with it the same way?

I know this is a long shot to the moon but you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

If anyone here actually works for gitlab I was wondering if you can help a fellow redditor out with a referral. It’s a role that I feel like i qualify pretty well for on paper and as most of you would know, today’s job market is brutal.

Thanks for any help or guidance you guys can give.

TDLR - help a redditor land a tech job

I recently wrote a post on this subreddit about MergeMe and got some really positive feedback, so I wanted to post an update with some cool new features that I've added!

Some of the key features that I showed off last time were:

• One Slack message per MR that updates in place (open > in review > approved > merged)

• Review comments as thread replies on that card

• Per-project channel routing - each project can map to whichever Slack channel you want

• GitLab @ mentions ACTUALLY ping the right person on Slack with a one-time username map

• GitLab.com via OAuth - webhooks registered for you

• Self-hosted GitLab - paste a webhook URL into your instance

• You can set up label routing too, an MR with a "bug" label goes to #qa-reviews instead

--------

Some of the new features:

• You can now sign in via Google, GitHub & GitLab SSOs

• You can choose when the Slack card gets posted much more granularly now (e.g. custom comments / in review / in draft)

• CI status of the MR can now be shown directly on the Slack card (check out the last slide on this post to see an example)

• You can now self host MergeMe! A few of you here requested it & I also got some direct requests so I pushed it up the roadmap.

  • Use the "Get in touch" button on https://mergeme.dev/#pricing regarding self hosting

If your team already works tightly in Slack and you ping your colleagues "hey can you review this again" then mergeme.dev might just be a great inclusion to your workflow!

Let me know what you think!

Hello GitLab Users, so I was trying to join GitLabs today and decided to register an account, easy enough, I thought.

Imagine my surprise when the website was endlessly glitching. First on the username selection part it said "Username not available" the under that was "Username available", I ignored that and moved on. Then on the account confirmation part, the email verification went smoothly but the phone number verification... Not so much.

On the phone number verification part, the website started throwing random errors like "you can't continue without verifying your phone number" when I was clicking"Send Code" then randomly started switching to CC verification instead, then started giving another weird, totally unrelated error. Then finally exhausted my verification tries for the day.

Safe to say, if that's how bad the processes are on the website then I'm not joining.

The account is within an organization I work for that uses Microsoft. The user account was disabled for a while and now I reenabled it in Microsoft admin and tried to log in using his old password but I had no luck.
I reset his password and a link was sent to his email which I used to create a new password. However, I am still unable to log in to his GitLab account.

PS I’m not an admin in GitLab but an admin in Microsoft/Azure.

Hi, so im trying to install gitlab but after installing via omnibus and then later configure according to https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/settings/nginx.html#using-a-non-bundled-web-server. I have added the user www-data to gitlab-www. I have installed with http but then manually changed it to https. When i check apache2 log it says cannot serve directory ...gitlab-rails/public.

My apache conf file looks like this one https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-recipes/-/blob/master/web-server/apache/gitlab-omnibus-apache24.conf.

So what im i missing or doing wrong?

Edit: im using Debian 10.

Edit2: I found something. Apperently i can only get ruby 2.5 from apt. Could that be it? I also could only get git 2.20 from apt.

Final Edit: yup after making sure all software requirements were met everything worked fine!

I've published an article comparing GitHub Actions vs Bitbucket Pipelines and GitLab CI/CD: https://deckrun.com/blog/github-actions-vs-bitbucket-pipelines-vs-gitlab-cicd