Mar 22, 2013 -

GitLab 5.0 release, standing on its own two feet

Learn more about GitLab 5.0 release improvements and new features.

GitLab 5.0 release, standing on its own two feet

Dear fellow GitLab enthusiasts,

Today marks the release of GitLab v5.0. In the last month a lot of work went into making GitLab faster, fully-featured and stable. And we have a lot of awesome changes to celebrate in this release. From now own GitLab is standing firmly on its own two feet with the introduction of GitLab shell.

GitLab is quickly maturing due to commercial support and cloud hosting. Since co-founding GitLab.com Dmitriy has been able to work on GitLab full-time, this means this release has more new features and better tests than ever. The GitLab Cloud service run by GitLab.com has grown to thousands of active users. This meant we had to improve GitLab performance and concurrency and these improvements all made their way into GitLab 5.0.

Before today every GitLab installation also meant installing Gitolite. Gitolite is a fine program but having the server standing on a GitLab foot and a Gitolite foot caused problems. Installing them and keeping the configurations in sync was a constant source of problems for many administrators of GitLab installation. Today Gitolite is replaced with GitLab-shell which will make installing and maintaining GitLab a lot easier.

The 3 most important improvements in GitLab 5.0

  1. GitLab-shell replaces Gitolite
  2. Instead of needing gitlab & git users accounts on the system we now only need git user to run GitLab
  3. The wiki is stored in a git repository using the gollum library.

The wiki git repository was contributed by Dan Knox. We want to thank him for the great contribution and name him the Most Valuable Person (MVP) for this release.

At GitLab.com we are seeing that more organizations are interested in our subscription service. The cooperation with these organizations will lead to some cool new features for GitLab 5.1 and beyond.

We tried hard to make this major upgrade as easy as possible. Even before this release more than 3.000 installations where already upgraded to 5.0.

Changes

  1. Features:

    • Import repository
    • Wiki on git using Gollum
    • Project, Group and Team description added
    • External issue tracker support
  2. Dependencies:

    • Gitolite replaced with gitlab-shell
  3. Security:

    • Use protected links for attachments
    • Rails, devise and other libraries updated
    • Several fixes to prevent XSS

Also a lot of usability & UI improvements and much more.

What we removed in 5.0:

  • gitolite support

What should be updated during migration:

Beside moving all stuff from gitlab to git user you also need to update next:

  • gitlab.yml config
  • init.d script
  • nginx: replace home/gitlab with home/git
  • config/unicorn.rb: replace home/gitlab with home/git

SCREENSHOTS

Dashboard:

screenshot

Import repo:

screenshot

Project page:

screenshot

Wall behaves like chat now:

screenshot

Network Graph was improved too:

screenshot

One more theme for code review:

screenshot


Guides:


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