Re-import a chosen project relation by using the API
When importing projects from export files with many items of the same type (for example, merge requests or pipelines), sometimes some of those items weren’t imported.
In this release, we added an API endpoint that re-imports a named relation, skipping items that have already been imported. The API requires both:
- A project export archive.
- A type. Either issues, merge requests, pipelines, or milestones.
Enhanced epic deletion protection
We’ve updated what happens when you delete an epic to better safeguard your project’s structure and data. It’s all about giving you more control and peace of mind while managing your projects.
Now, when you delete a parent epic, instead of deleting all its child records automatically, we preserve them by detaching the parent relationship first. This change provides you with a safer way to manage your epics, ensuring accidental deletions don’t result in losing valuable information.
New median time to merge metric in Value Streams Dashboard
We added a new metric to the Value Streams Dashboard: median time to merge. In GitLab, this metric represents the median time between when a merge request was created and when it was merged. This new metric measures DevOps health by identifying the efficiency and productivity of your merge request and code review processes.
By analyzing how this metric evolves in the context of other SDLC metrics, teams can identify low or high productivity months, understand the impact of new DevOps practices on the development speed and delivery process, reduce their overall lead time, and increase the velocity of their software delivery.
Semantic version ranges for published CI/CD components
When using a CI/CD catalog component, you might want to have it automatically use the latest version. For example, you don’t want to have to manually monitor all the components you use, and manually switch to the next version every time there is a minor update or security patch. But using ~latest
is also a bit risky, because minor version updates could have undesired behavior changes, and major version updates have a higher risk of breaking changes.
With this release, you can opt into using the latest major or minor version of a CI/CD component. For example, specify 2
for the component version, and you’ll get all updates for that major version, like 2.1.1
, 2.1.2
, 2.2.0
, but not 3.0.0
. Specify 2.1
and you’ll only get patch updates for that minor version, like 2.1.1
, 2.1.2
, but not 2.2.0
.
New permission for custom roles
There is a new permission available for custom roles:
With the release of this new permission, you can reduce the number of Owners needed in a group by creating a custom role with these Owner-equivalent permissions. Custom roles allow you to define granular roles that give a user only the permissions they need to do their jobs, and reduce unnecessary privilege escalation.
Design Management features extended to Product teams
GitLab is expanding collaboration by updating our permissions. Now, users with the Reporter role can access Design Management features, enabling product teams to engage more directly in the design process. This change simplifies workflows and accelerates innovation by inviting broader participation from across your organization.
Milestones and iterations visible on issue boards
We’ve improved issue boards to offer you clearer insights into your project’s timeline and phases. Now, with milestone and iteration details directly visible on issue cards, you can easily track progress and adjust your team’s workload on the fly. This enhancement is designed to make your planning and execution more efficient, keeping you in the loop and ahead of schedule.
Simplified configuration file schema for Value Streams Dashboard
You can now customize Value Streams Dashboard panels using a simplified schema-driven customizable UI framework. In the new format, the fields provide more flexibility of displaying the data and laying out the dashboard panels. With the new framework, administrators can track changes to the dashboard over time. This version history can help you revert to previous versions and compare changes between dashboard versions.
Using this customization, decision-makers can focus on the most relevant information for their business, while teams can better organize and display key DevSecOps metrics.
Standardized CI/CD Catalog component publishing process
We have been hard at work on CI/CD components, including making the process of releasing components to the CI/CD Catalog a consistent experience. As part of that work, we’ve made releasing versions from a CI/CD job with the release
keyword and the release-cli
image the only method. All improvements to the release process will apply to this method only. To avoid breaking changes introduced by this restriction make sure you always use the latest version of the image, release-cli:latest
or at least a version greater than v0.16
. The Releases option in the UI is now disabled for CI/CD component projects.
UX improvements to custom roles
A series of improvements have been made to the user experience for custom roles, specifically: