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GitLab Repositories

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GitLab consists of many subprojects. A curated list of GitLab projects can be found at the GitLab Engineering projects page.

Creating a new project

When creating a new project, please follow these steps:

  1. Read and familiarize yourself with our stance on Dogfooding. Be aware that as part of a product development organization that builds a tool for people like us, that our default is to add features and tooling to the GitLab project. This is still true when the effort to do so is 2-5x. Despite this, if you still feel you need to create a project outside of GitLab, you must follow this process to document the decision
  2. Ensure the project is under a subgroup of:
    • gitlab-org for anything related to the application.
    • gitlab-com for anything strictly company related.

    To avoid complications with context and permissions inheritance, creating projects directly under these root namespaces (e.g. gitlab-org/NEW_PROJECT) is discouraged. Only Maintainers can create projects there when necessary, but should also avoid doing so for the reason mentioned before. If you don't have the permissions to create a project there, you can create an Access Request issue and ping one of the Maintainers (gitlab-org, and gitlab-com) for approval.

  3. Configure the project repository to use main as the name of the default branch.
  4. Add the project to the list of GitLab projects in projects.yml.
  5. Help AppSec categorizing your new project.
  6. Add a license to the repository. Contact #legal as to which license to add. A sample license is here: gitlab-org/gitlab MIT License, but contact legal before using it.
  7. Add a section titled "Developer Certificate of Origin and License" to CONTRIBUTING.md in the repository. It is easiest to simply copy-paste the gitlab-org/gitaly DCO + License section verbatim.1. Add any further relevant details to the Contribution Guide. See Contribution Example.
  8. Add a link to CONTRIBUTING.md from the project's README.md.
  9. Add a CODEOWNERS file, to make it easy for contributors to figure out which teams are best suited to review their changes.
    • Use teams rather than individuals as owners, to make it self updating over time and resilient to people taking time off
    • You can scope ownership to subdirectories or individual files, but it should contain at the very least a top-level catch all for any new or non explicitly mentionned file.
  10. When possible, projects should have the following Merge request settings enabled:
  11. When possible, projects should have the following Pipeline settings enabled:
  12. Projects should have the minimum Baseline Configurations setup for MR Approval Rules and Protected Branch Settings
  13. Projects should have Users can request access setting disabled to discourage granting accidental external access.
  14. If needed, make sure to set up a default CI/CD configuration.
  15. If your project contains code that is distributed with GitLab or is executed in production, set up security jobs for your project and add your project to the AppSec team's triage rotation. The AppSec will triage security findings from the Security Dashboard and create issues for vulnerabilities.
  16. If the project is part of work that is shipped to customers, add it to projects_part_of_product.csv by opening an MR to that file or following the process outlined by Engineering Productivity.
  17. If the repository is public, set up a security mirror. This is necessary to address security vulnerabilities without disclosing them before they are fixed.

When changing the settings in an existing repository, it's important to keep communication in mind. In addition to discussing the change in an issue and announcing it in relevant chat channels (e.g., #development), consider announcing the change in the Engineering Week-in-Review document. This is particularly important for changes to the GitLab repository.

CI/CD configuration

Following is the default .gitlab-ci.yml config that all projects under the gitlab-org and gitlab-com groups should use:

include:
  - template: 'Workflows/MergeRequest-Pipelines.gitlab-ci.yml'

default:
  tags:
    - gitlab-org

Or if the project needs to support stable/security branches, use the following instead:

workflow:
  rules:
    # For merge requests, create a pipeline.
    - if: '$CI_MERGE_REQUEST_IID'
    # For `master` branch, create a pipeline (this includes on schedules, pushes, merges, etc.).
    - if: '$CI_COMMIT_BRANCH == $CI_DEFAULT_BRANCH'
    # For tags, create a pipeline.
    - if: '$CI_COMMIT_TAG'
    # For stable, and security branches, create a pipeline.
    - if: '$CI_COMMIT_BRANCH =~ /^[\d-]+-stable(-ee)?$/'
    - if: '$CI_COMMIT_BRANCH =~ /^security\//'

default:
  tags:
    - gitlab-org

This:

  1. Includes a workflow to create pipelines for MR, master, and tags only.
  2. Defines the gitlab-org tag to be used by default which corresponds to cost-optimised runners, with no Docker support. Jobs that need Docker support would use the gitlab-org-docker tag.

If a job requires the usage of Docker, it needs to be defined only in the context of the specific job with the gitlab-org-docker tag:

sast:
  tags:
    - gitlab-org-docker

If a job requires the usage of Windows, SaaS runners on Windows should be used. For the exact configuration please check the SaaS runner on Windows documentation.

Publishing a Project

To publish a project to a package repository, please follow these directions.

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