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Thanks for replying. I did actually check your home page, and various others on the site, before commenting. The best way I can think of to describe my experience is that it feels like I'm reading something written for someone who already knows what they're looking for and what the context is, but that's exactly what I'm there to find out. Perhaps some examples would help. For context, I am about to set up the infrastructure for a new project, involving source control, issue tracking, testing, deployment and so on. From past discussions with friends and colleagues who have used GitLab, I had the impression that it was somewhat like GitHub, in the sense of providing a front-end to help manage Git repos and some related facilities like issue tracking and CI, but GitLab was based on OSS and could be hosted locally. So, GitLab seems like something I should be very interested in right now. I'm an experienced developer and familiar with many other tools, so my interest is in whether GitLab might offer a better approach than things we've used before. However, looking at the site, I can't find anything describing the relationship between GitLab and Git anywhere on the home page. I checked the features page, but again found nothing, aside from a few passing references to actions like merging but only in the context of other functionality. I tried putting "git" into the search box on the documentation page, but again, nothing. Have I just totally misunderstood what GitLab does? And if so, why "Git" in the name? Likewise, I honestly can't tell whether GitLab is an OSS project or some sort of hosted enterprise "call us for pricing" behemoth (or both or neither). I've seen references to open source and some sort of community edition, but the "Community" link on the top of the site is clearly about something else entirely. There's a pricing page with various plans including a free plan, but while I initially assumed they were for a hosted online service, apparently they're for self-hosted. There is information about many ways to install GitLab locally on different platforms, but it's not clear what you're actually installing at that point or whether you then need some sort of licence to do anything with it. On the features page, each item has two different scales under it, one for GitLab and one for GitLab.com, but I really have no idea what the relationship between those is. There is an entirely separate feature comparison table that is actually linked from the pricing page, but that only shows one of the scales, and suggests that the lower/free tier is quite restrictive. But these look like they're self-hosted options and if there's OSS involved then how does that restriction work? I hope you'll forgive the brain dump, but other than showing a stream of consciousness as I looked through the site earlier today and how I was unable to answer my two most basic questions, I can't think of a better way to illustrate the difficulty I encountered. |
Gitlab is a web interface for git. It is like Github, but much better. Gitlab also includes a great CI server (a bit like travis ci, or circle ci). It has a docker registry if you need that. It has issue tracking if you want to use that.
There is an open source free community version that does most things. There is also an enterprise version if you need permissions managed by Active Directory or something like that. And there is a cloud-hosted version if you don't want to host your own instance.
I hope that helps a bit.