GitLab is a great tool for software developers and makes our work much easier

Item: GitLab
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use GitLab for source code management - we store our source code or also configuration files in repositories and work on them together. Most used functionalities are branching, committing, creating merge requests. This helps us to work together on the same code base without having trouble with consistency or bringing everything together. Also, GitLab pipelines are used for building and deploying images based on our source code. Before every build, we do some automated checks (e.g. lint, bandid, etc.) to ensure that our code has a good and consistent quality and security risks are scaled down. When the code passes the checks, the pipeline builds the code, creates an image and deploys the code to test, dev or production environments. This helps us to deploy much faster, with less errors and better code.

Pros and Cons

Source code management and historicization
Easy to learn
Visualization of pipeline progress
Merge requests
Wiki
Groups and repos for a good structure
Build-in Visual Studio Code Editor

Search functionality for words inside source code
Possibility to define extra roles for user management to improve security
Performance optimization under heavy usage

Return on Investment

Increased productivity
Better collaboration
Faster time to marked
Better code quality
Initial investment costs time, resources and training
Maintainance and updates also cost resources

Alternatives Considered

Jenkins

GitLab fits our needs much better because it is a all-in-one solution and is easier to learn. We have a wide range of users - senior software developers and people who only write small, easy scripts or just start pipelines. Jenkins is rather useful when e.g. more fine-grained control over pipelines is required. Also the collaboration features of GitLab are really good and intuitive and one of the most needed use cases in our company.

Security

We use 2FA which makes it more difficult for attackers to gain unauthorized access and is also a security requirement within our company. Also, the code review and approval functionalities are considered as security feature in our company because with changes to the main branch, often a deployment to production systems is triggered. With code reviews and approvals, we ensure that no unintended code is being published.

Continuous Integration

With the feature to automatically build, test and deploy code changes, we have reduced validation problems because of automated tests. Every new build is being tested - this way we see problems before deploying our code changes and the validation phase is also much shorter because we don't have to test ourselves and have the risk to oversee anything.
Also the features merge requests and approvals ensure that our changes are compatible with the rest of the codebase which makes the collaboration easy.

Key Insights

Do you think GitLab delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with GitLab's feature set?

Yes

Did GitLab live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of GitLab go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy GitLab again?

Yes

Other Software Used

JFrog Artifactory, Miro, Microsoft 365

Likelihood to Recommend

I work with GitLab since years and it's a huge help in my daily work as software developer. In our team, we manage source code and configuration files in GitLab and work on them together. The amount of people working on a project can differ from 1 to 20 but with the functionalities of GitLab, we hardly have any problems! We use branching, mostly using the concept of GitLab flow, and it works like a charm even when more people work on the same file. Merge requests are very helpful and easy to handle even when there are conflicts - the UI as well as the CLI handling for that are really easy to learn.

Also pipelines are such a great tool to make the lifecycle of an application much faster while also taking care of code quality! Our pipelines check our code for unused variables / methods, the coding style and also scans for security risks to ensure a good code quality. Also we build our images with it and deploy on different environments without the need to do any manual work. There's really not much which is bad about GitLab in the area of source code & config management.