A review of GitLab as an alternative to Alioth as part of the sprint.
Update: Debian now runs its own gitlab instance at https://salsa.debian.org.
Feature Comparison
Features |
Alioth |
GitHub |
GitLab Community Edition |
Open source |
|
No |
Yes |
Merge Requests |
|
Yes |
Yes |
Code review |
|
Yes |
Yes |
Merge conflict resolution |
|
Yes |
Yes |
Merge request versions |
|
Yes |
Yes |
Inline commenting & resolution |
|
Yes |
Yes |
Integrated CI/CD |
|
No |
Yes |
Issue boards |
|
Yes |
Yes |
Cherry-picking |
|
No |
Yes |
Merge on pipeline success |
|
No |
Yes |
WIP merge requests |
|
No |
Yes |
Flexible permissions |
|
No |
Yes |
Allow edits from upstream maintainers in branch |
|
Yes |
No - GitLab issue |
Language |
|
Ruby |
Ruby + Go |
Import projects |
|
Yes - SVN, Mercurial, TFS, Git |
Yes - GitHub, BitBucket, Google Code, FogBugz, Gitea, Git |
For a comparison with GitHub also see the GitLab comparison page
License
GitLab is an open-core product where GitLab Community Edition is open-source, MIT license, and GitLab Enterprise Edition is open-core.
Other Independent Reviews/Comparisons of GitLab
Also see the comparison and review on GitLab done by the GNOME project
Scaling GitLab
GitLab is running roughly 1M repos in the production architecture of GitLab.com. It is likely excessive but a useful reference point to scaling. GitLab's production dashboard
Advantages of GitLab
GitLab has an official debian package contributed by Pirate Praveen
Large community of contributors behind the project - over 1700 contributors
- Very good UI that has recently been updated
- Low resource and maintenance required
- Low entry threshold for new contributors due to familiarity
- Integrated CI/CD with pipeline and environment management