GitLab 6.3 released: open-source software to collaborate on code | Hacker News Reader

GitLab 6.3 released: open-source software to collaborate on code

blog.gitlab.org

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A few earlier discussions, for those looking for backstory:

3.0 release (Oct. 2012): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4687455

4.0 release (Dec. 2012): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4959417

5.0 release (Mar. 2013): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5422950

6.0 release (Aug. 2013): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6270446

For those who aren't familiar, Gitlab is essentially an open-source clone of Github.

For those who already use it, this is a good time to upgrade, because multiple security vulnerabilities were recently fixed [1]. (You can upgrade to a patch version within the same major/minor release, e.g. 6.2.3 to 6.2.4, but it's not too much more effort to just upgrade to the latest 6.3 release).

[1] http://blog.gitlab.org/multiple-critical-vulnerabilities-in-...

If you want to give it a try in your computer or in the cloud you can use one of the images from bitnami. We already have updated them to gitlab 6.3

http://bitnami.com/stack/gitlab

http://www.gitlab.com/cloud/ offers free, unlimited private (and public) repositories and might also be a good place to try it.

One other thing from the GitLab GitHub repo (https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/master/README.md#i...)

"Digital Ocean 1-Click Application Install Have a new server up in 55 seconds. Digital Ocean uses SSD disks which is great for an IO intensive app as GitLab. Look for GitLab under 'Select Image' => 'Applications' when creating a droplet."

Digital Ocean also added one-click spin-ups of a gitlab VM recently.

I'm considering GitLab for use at work. How does it stack up against Atlassian Stash? (https://www.atlassian.com/software/stash/overview)

I've had to compare the two. At the current state, Stash is better than GitLab in almost all ways. Better UI, more features and other small things that make a big difference (e.g. repo sync).

GitLab, on the other hand, has two advantages over Stash. Firstly it's open source (+free). Secondly and most importantly, GitLab is under active development and there is a new release with reasonable amount of content every month.

I haven't installed Stash, but for what it's worth GitLab installation and upgrades have been really straightforward.

I was trying out GitLab EE and ran into some install issues on RHEL5 (which were solvable - http://www.digitalsanctuary.com/tech-blog/general/installing... ). However even after a couple days I was unable to get the LDAP integration and LDAP group permissions to work correctly. GitLab support wasn't able to solve it for me, so I tried Stash. 30 minutes later, up and running the way I wanted it.

Hi Modoc, GitLab.com co-founder here. I'm sorry to hear you GitLab.com support did not solve your problem to your satisfaction. Supporting our customers is our main priority. Feel free to email me at sytse@gitlab.com if you want to give us feedback about what happend.

    At the current state, Stash is better than GitLab

Yes.

    GitLab, on the other hand, has two advantages over Stash ... GitLab is under active development and there is a new release with reasonable amount of content every month.

No.

Stash 2.9 was just released [1] about seven weeks after Stash 2.8 [2] about seven weeks after Stash 2.7 [3].

[1] https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/STASH/Stash+2.9+rel...

[2] https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/STASH/Stash+2.8+rel...

[3] https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/STASH/Stash+2.7+rel...

Stash isn't open source, though.

Hence the ellipsis...

Last time I've tried to install (~ 9-10 months ago): - Stash: it was a no-brainer (easy setup, easy use). - GitLab: hours spent with frustration (hard to setup, but this might have changed now, I need to try it again).

Stash seem to have a larger team behind it, with more features, documentation and snappier responses, but GitLab is promising too. I hope they all can be profitable and keep up the speed of improvements in all of the products.

We're using Gitlab at work, our sysops set it up so I can't speak to the pain of dealing with that but overall the experience has been positive switching from Gitolite and Gitblit. If I had known about stash before they started implementing gitlab I may have suggested it though. I much prefer the Bitbucket interface to the Github.

Few pain points about Gitlab, large diffs cannot be merged or diffed through a merge request which is our preferred way to merge branches since you can autoclose the branches from there and provide the per line comments on the diff. The diff display currently has no option to hide whitespace (though they are open to pull requests that implement the `?w=1` convention github does.

Other than that thought I can't say I've had a negative experience with Gitlab.

I set Gitlab up for the internal development team at work and we love it. The installation isn't a one-click affair that many people are used to nowadays but it's not hard.

One of the reasons that we chose Gitlab is because it's open source. We've made some tweaks to it so that it better fits our needs.

2 biggest downsides to GitLab:

1) It's a resource hog. Big time.

2) It's incredibly hard to set up. The installation instructions and the development instructions are essentially the same. Key point, an end user should never have to `bundle install`, ever.

it is?

Oh... it's made in ruby.

https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/tree/master/app/control...

self comment: this post isn't gonna end well :P

Agreed on both counts - I blame Ruby.

We enjoy using it, but to new users I would recommend looking into gitbucket

https://github.com/takezoe/gitbucket

written in scala and no install necessary!

I didn't know about gitbucket and just tried it. It is a war file that brings everything. It is easy to setup and can run standalone for tests: java -jar gitbucket.war. The UI is mostly github. First impression is really good.

Installed it and am impressed as well. Wonder how this has stayed underneath the radar. Can turn off that bulky GitLab droplet now.

Oh wow. I've been using GitLab since 4.0, but I've not got it completely updated because it's such a pain in the ass. This looks awesome (and gives me a Scala project to hack on!)

Thanks for letting me know about this little jem. That was an extreme contrast in deployment. I feel like throwing out bitbucket and setting this up on one of our virtual machines. This looks perfect!

I don't know about the resources part, but the installation should be easy using Bitnami

http://bitnami.com/stack/gitlab

@2) Maybe in an older version, but not anymore. The installation is not as nice as in a single apt-get call, but the install documentation makes a setup a matter of copy'n'paste.

Copying and pasting a few dozen commands and one of them is very likely to fail. I've installed GitLab 3 times and something has failed all 3 times. There's no excuse not to provide a tarball that includes (1) both gitlabhq and gitlab-shell (2) all gems needed. Everything else can be apt-get installed, which is fine. But at least provide a tarball of your application's code.

I love GitLab, and yeah the install isn't hard. But have you ever tried updating it? Impossible as far as I've tried. Breaks stuff every time :(

I upgrade regularly, typically two weeks after release of a new version (except when there are security fixes, like recently).

It could (and should) be more streamlined, I admit, but using diff et al. on the two affected configuration files makes the process fast. One could do it by hand w/o issues, but I wouldn't like it.

Been using GitLab since (I think) 4.0 and have yet to experience any problems upgrading on a fairly standard LAMP-like web server setup on a VPS. To anyone having troubles, what exactly are the errors/problems?

(Late) Edit: any problems I've ever had with upgrades have been related to not properly adjusting settings when moving new config files around. For example, in upgrading to 6.3 I failed to copy over my custom listen lines in unicorn for a non-standard port.

I maintain a set of Chef cookbooks (more Ruby, I'm afraid ;)) that includes a cookbook for GitLab[1]. The cookbook may not be the best, but it has been serving us well. There are numerous other Chef cookbooks for GitLab.

IMHO GitLab is easy to set up compared to something like Postfix. Making a GitLab server do what it's supposed to do is straightforward. You just follow all the steps. Making Postfix work as a proper mail server is kinda a mess.

[1]: https://github.com/phunehehe/chef-cookbooks/tree/master/gitl...

> IMHO GitLab is easy to set up compared to something like Postfix. Making a GitLab server do what it's supposed to do is straightforward. You just follow all the steps. Making Postfix work as a proper mail server is kinda a mess.

Heh, I feel exactly the opposite.

Tried installing it locally on my RaspberryPi - while the latter is already hard, this ended up being impossible. I stuck with gitolite which is the easiest ever. Even the configuration is a git repo.

You might try RhodeCode, we spend a lot of resources recently into an Installer for it that makes a few clicks installation, even for windows.

Yes, the installation of RhodeCode is really a no-brainer now.

there is also http://gitblit.com - only dependency is java.

looks like its quite feature rich - federation, verdict integration, plugins, active directory integration, etc and doesn't look like a github clone.

We are using gitblit. Installation and use is super easy. We have integrated it with LDAP for authentication and Jenkins for auto builds using hooks.

Gitblit surely must be the git world's hidden gem. It's less "Githubby" in features, but stacks up really well to commercial offerings like GitStack or Atlassian Stash.

I had the similar "omg, it just works" experience.

GitLab is cool, but Gitorious is where it's at. 3.0 just came out bringing many improvements and it's AGPL licensed.

Absolutely not unless you want to trash your server on install.

http://gitorious.org

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1rbgpr/gitlab_6...

Gitorious seems dangerous:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1rbgpr/gitlab_6...

How does GitLab compares to Gerrit? At work we are massively using Gerrit and loving it, but as I can see, GitLab has also a neat CI integration.

GitLab.com co-founder here. GitLab has merge requests to do code review for feature branches. These include assignments and line comments. You can't assign a review to multiple people but it is easy to mention people to get them to chime in. Also, it has +1 & -1 voting aggregation :-)

Not meaning to hijack, but would love to hear about an equivalent for mercurial that runs on linux.

If you prefer python, Rhodecode is free for up to 20 users https://rhodecode.com/features

It was very easy to setup too, and they have immediate feedback if you have problems. We're currently using it at my workplace and loving it.

Clearly that is not comparable as GitLab is FLOSS.

As far as I understood, RhodeCode’s core is open source (GPLv3) and even the proprietary parts are free for teams up to 20 users.

Ok, good to know, but core being open ≠ open.

And most important: it also support Mercurial - so no lock-into Git.

Does it have public repos?

That was just added last month, in 6.2: http://blog.gitlab.org/gitlab-ce-6-dot-2-released/

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