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GitLab is like, really good. No need to put your codebase in the "cloud."
by reversengineer 1y ago
GitLab is like, really good. No need to put your codebase in the "cloud."
- yoran 1y agoI feel like all new AI tools only integrate with GitHub though, like Claude Code. We're actually thinking of moving from GitLab to GitHub, just for this reason.
- felixgallo 1y agoClaude works great with forgejo/gitea. It's all just git, after all.
- mbonnet 1y agoIn some industries, all the tools you actually need (say, MISRA checking) all work with GitLab out of the box.
- tonyhart7 1y agosame reason why we didn't leave github yet most SaaS tools only have github integration which is sucks
- troyvit 1y agoIs that a problem with GitLab or a problem that should make you wary of Claude Code though? It's one thing to lock yourself into one LLM provider, but when they start chaining you to other SaSS organizations aren't they just locking you down even more?
- Catbert59 1y agoGitLab is great - but super fat. The performance will suffer heavily if you don't give it the resources it wants (all RAM you can find, lol). If you only need Git plus project tracking Gitea is super mature. It runs happily on small VPS.
- kstrauser 1y agoI prefer Forgejo, but both it and Gitea support actions like GitHub's. You can have a nice CI/CD pipeline that runs 100% in-house, for free. I adore it for personal projects.
- mdaniel 1y ago> Gitea support actions like GitHub's Citation needed. nektos/act is for sure not "like GitHub's"
- milliams 1y agoYes it is. It's not identical, but it is "like" it.
- cowmix 1y agoMost of my build config run on either platform (Gitea and Github) interchangeably.
- kstrauser 1y agoHere's Gitea's own comparison to GitHub's Actions: https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/comparison https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/comparison Sure, it's not identical, and no one claims it is. I think it's defensibly like them, though.
- dboreham 1y agoWe've run Gitea actions (and contributed here and there) for a couple of years, since-by-side with Github. We host in containers on the Gitea side so there are some marginal differences as to what can be run in a job, but our experience has been very positive.
- ctz 1y ago> You can have a nice CI/CD pipeline that runs 100% in-house, for free. Interested! Some detail on how you achieve this for free would be great.
- jmclnx 1y agoI went there last year due to Microsoft's destruction of github.
- mdaniel 1y agoAnd, if you don't like something there's a very good chance you could be the change you want to see - they have a pretty welcoming contribution culture. Even if you don't want to change something, being able to read the source for it goes a long way toward aligning your understanding of the behavior, and that's not a diss on their usually pretty good documentation
- moffkalast 1y agoGitlab is like the SAP of git, something for bloated big corporations. I've never seen a single FOSS repo there.
- mdaniel 1y agoYeah, who's ever heard of this weird company named nvidia <https://gitlab.com/nvidia https://gitlab.com/nvidia>, or inkscape <https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape>, or F-Droid <https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient>
- justinrubek 1y agoIn what world does nvidia fall under FOSS and not big corporation? That seems like an odd example to lead with.
- kube-system 1y agoFOSS and "big corporation" are not antonyms. Today, many of the largest FOSS contributors are big corporations.
- traceroute66 1y agoDidn't nobody ever tell you to "never say never" ? Knot DNS[1] good enough for you ? GPL licensed. [1] https://gitlab.nic.cz/knot/knot-dns https://gitlab.nic.cz/knot/knot-dns
- terminalbraid 1y agoI don't care much for gitlab either, but for example inkscape lives there https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape
- Gracana 1y agoIt seems somewhat popular for developers who want to avoid github. Gnome and KiCAD also use it.
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- dcchambers 1y ago> No need to put your codebase in the "cloud." Yes and no. If all you want is a remote git server then no, there's not. But there's plenty of legitimate reasons to use a SaaS tool like GitHub.
- mdaniel 1y agoIn my experience, the "really good" is that it comes batteries included: - completely docker based CI/CD which makes reasoning about what it's going to do easier than "read through some minified .js from some rando" - they do have composable CI/CD akin to the GitHub Actions marketplace, but I haven't used it as much in anger to speak to how valuable it is versus "competitive checkbox feature" - built-in Terraform State, so no more S3 + Dynamo - highly configurable JWT claim curation for ease of OIDC based access from the pipelines - good integration between the platform and multiple Kubernetes clusters - related to that, a strong "review environment" setup - they were also hinting at being a Sentry replacement, but regrettably I had to switch back to GitHub before that came out of preview so I don't this second know where it stands
- dusanh 1y agoI can map most of the list but I can't recall what would be the "review environment setup" What did you mean by that?
- mdaniel 1y agoPedantically I think GLCI treats every environment the same, but by review environments I meant "disposable copies of the app such that one could interact with it during merge request review" e.g. https://mr-8675.example.com https://mr-8675.example.com corresponding to /example/-/merge_request/8675 that would be provisioned when the MR was opened and torn down when the MR was merged or closed <https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/yaml/#environment https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/yaml/#environment> plus <https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/yaml/#dynamic-environments https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/yaml/#dynamic-environments> et al I believe it aligns with this behavior in GitHub: <https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/deploy/configure-and-manage-deployments/manage-environments https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/deploy/configure-...> with the distinction that it appears from the GH docs that they think of that as "needs administrative approval" whereas GLCI thinks of it as "if the pipeline has permissions to run provisioning, off to the races, because names are free" GitLab introduced the "deployment tier" I think as a means of communication to other users about the importance of the environment, but control over what credentials were made available to CI/CD was always controlled via <https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/environments/#limit-the-environment-scope-of-a-cicd-variable https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/environments/#limit-the-environme...> which partially explains why the only reason to involve a repository administrator would be to install or update a secret needed to deploy successfully --- it the spirit of "they really, really drink their own champagne," one can see the environments for GitLab itself https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/environments https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/environments
- CSMastermind 1y agoGitLab is wonderful but none of the AI tooling supports it and it's expensive.
- em-bee 1y agonone of the AI tooling supports it i consider that a feature
- mbesto 1y agoFor a couple grand a year, not having to worry about upgrades, backups, hosting cost, etc. is 100% worth it.
- uncircle 1y ago“Really good” under which metric? Because it is slow, even more confusing after the terrible sidebar redesign and, to quote a famous author, its usage does not spark any joy. Codeberg and gitea, on the other hand, feel great, like early Github. Fast and simple, instead of a product that’s adding feature on top of half-baked feature to capture the sweet corporate $$$.
- oefrha 1y agoReally good if you go by a feature checklist, probably. A bloated clutter of more or less working features, checking enterprise boxes.
- darkwater 1y agoI have to agree. I recently joined a company using Gitlab, coming from years of GitHub only. I have a soft spot for underdogs but I already found many features with bugs (especially related to hierarchy and inheritance) that makes you feel "meh".
- IshKebab 1y agoIt's... ok. But many of the really useful features are paid. E.g. merge trains or mandatory reviews. I also don't think "it's open source!" is a huge differentiator because it's enormous, difficult to deploy from source and written in Ruby so the chance of being able to actually modify it for some feature you want is near zero. I think Forgejo is probably a way better option at this point even if it is less mature. It's written in Go so way easier to deploy and edit. And none of the features are paid. I do like Gitlab but... it's not amazing. I liked Phabricator more (except for its lack of integrated CI).
- quesera 1y ago> written in Ruby so the chance of being able to actually modify it for some feature you want is near zero That's a silly thing to say.
- IshKebab 1y agoIt isn't. Ruby lacks static typing, and Rails heavily uses generated identifiers, which means navigating a huge codebase like Gitlab is basically impossible unless it's your full time job (or you get lucky). I've tried. I kept finding methods that - based on a grep - were never called from anywhere, and there's no IDE support for something like Find All References. I'm sure if it was your full time job you'd eventually learn the codebase, but there's no way you can just dip in and add a feature unless you really persevere. But I did manage to add a few features to the gitlab-runner (used for CI) - because it's written in Go, and Go has static types and pretty great IDE support these days. Night and day. I've also added a few features to VSCode which is a similarly huge codebase. Again it's written in Typescript which has static types and good IDE support. It would have been effectively impossible if that wasn't the case.
- quesera 1y agoThis does not match my experience at all, and I think your "near zero" claim is silly. > difficult to deploy from source I won't argue with you here. There are a lot of moving pieces in a Rails deployment. This isn't different from most web app frameworks, but it is difficult. That said, I've never worked on a Rails app where deployment was any more difficult than a variation on `bin/deploy v123 production`, because I wrote that script and it works 100% of the time. > and written in Ruby so the chance of being able to actually modify it for some feature you want is near zero But this is still silly. You just don't know Rails or Ruby well, and don't want to learn them. Fine, but if you hadn't already made that decision, you would find the solution simple enough. No judgement intended -- different framework/language paradigms fit different people differently. Rails has great IDE support also. Static typing can be a useful language feature, but a lack of same has not ever, in my experience, made it more difficult to understand real-world code. There is a lot to love about Go too, don't get me wrong. But I would guess that the number of random developers who could drop in and be immediately productive in a Ruby/Rails app, vs a Go webapp, is basically equivalent. The overlap of projects where both would be highly appropriate choices is a bit thin. [I hire into Ruby/Rails jobs regularly. I often hire senior developers with no Ruby/Rails background, but I do not hire people into these positions who are not open to learning. It takes a senior dev (from the C/Algol family) one day to learn Ruby, and (from a web dev background) a week or less to learn Rails. I have never seen a failure. I also hire into Go jobs almost as frequently. The hiring criteria is a bit different (less emphasis on web awareness), but I do find it easier to teach Go to a Ruby dev, than Ruby to a Go dev. Make of that what you will.]
- ElijahLynn 1y agoGitLab has a ton of options, And I find myself a bit overwhelmed by the user interface. It really needs a UX lead to simplify and create a better information architecture.
- maxloh 1y agoIt is rumored that Gitlab is about to be aquired. It may not still be open-source after that.
- shayief 1y agoI'll plug another option Gitpatch, however it's pretty early beta and not open-source yet, but most likely will be under AGPL at some point. It has built-in patch stacks (aka stacked PRs) and probably faster than any other Git host out there. disclosure: I'm the author.
- ectospheno 1y agoEvery place I write code I use whatever GitHub like thing the admin installed. They all work well enough. At home I prefer fossil. It isn’t without rough edges but for the small developer headcount stuff I do it is quite lovely.