GitLab 11.6 released with Serverless and Group-level Clusters

Authenticate with a smart card hardware token

For organizations operating in environments that use hardware tokens with X.509 certificates and smart card capabilities for authentication (like YubiKeys or Common Access Cards), GitLab now supports local user creation and login.

Users can now use hardware tokens to access GitLab, increasing security and avoiding the need for managing username/password credentials not connected to a physical token.

Discord notifications

With this release, you can now integrate GitLab with Discord, allowing you to send notifications to a Discord channel in response to GitLab events, such as pushes to a repository, updates to an issue, merge requests, and others.

Thank you Vitaliy Klachkov for the contribution!

Improved issue and merge request dashboard filtering

We’ve updated the search filter bar design for the issues and merge request dashboards, making it consistent with the similar search filter bars in the rest of GitLab.

View open or closed epics on roadmap

We recently introduced the ability to close epics, as a way to indicate that an epic is finished or no longer relevant.

With this release, we’re providing the option to view open epics, closed epics, or both on the roadmap view. This is helpful for teams that want to focus just on remaining and upcoming work (open epics), that want to review finished work (closed epics), or see recently finished work in conjunction with current work (both). This feature provides that flexibility. Additionally, your selection is saved to the system per user, so next time you return to a roadmap view, it will be what you have selected previously.

SSH push mirroring support with public-key authentication

Repository mirroring allows you to replicate Git repositories from one location to another. This makes it easier to work with multiple GitLab instances by mirroring your repository in GitLab to a different server. However, some target servers only allow Git access via SSH using public-key authentication.

GitLab now supports SSH push mirroring with public-key authentication, in addition to password-authenticated SSH and HTTP push mirroring.

Trigger variables are now hidden in UI by default

All trigger variables are now hidden by default in the UI and require a manual action to display. This will prevent unintended exposure of values when screen sharing or taking screenshots.

Improved project overview

With GitLab 11.6, we further iterate on the user interface of our project overview page, by introducing a better balance for the project header, improving whitespace and contrast to better highlight more frequently used actions, and improving the overall information structure.

Breadcrumb navigation shows ‘New’ and ‘Edit’ for milestones and labels

With this release, we enhance our GitLab breadcrumb navigation structure for milestones and labels. When creating or editing a milestone or label, the breadcrumb context shows an additional ‘New’ or ‘Edit’ item, now consistent with issues and merge requests.

Thank you George Tsiolis for the contribution!

HTTPS support for JupyterHub

JupyterHub notebooks provide a powerful way for data teams to share information. Oftentimes, sensitive data requires increased security.

Using Cert-manager for Kubernetes, JupyterHub will automatically serve Jupyter over HTTPS, providing increased security for your sensitive data.

Unlimited free guests for Gold plans

In 11.0, we introduced unlimited guest users for Ultimate plans.

We’re extending this to Gold plans, so groups using GitLab.com’s highest plan, whether self-managed or cloud SaaS, can benefit from adding guests at no additional cost.

Markdown front matter filtering for TOML and JSON

Front matter is metadata included at the beginning of a markdown document, often used by static site generators such as Jekyll and Hugo. When GitLab displays markdown files in repositories as rendered HTML, front matter retains its format and is displayed as-is, for clarity.

In addition to YAML front matter delimeters (---), GitLab now also supports TOML delimiters (+++), JSON delimiters (;;;), and arbitrary delimiters, enabling the support of any data format.

Thank you Travis Miller for your contribution!

Geo improvements

We continually focus on improving our Geo feature for distributed teams. Some of the noteworthy improvements in GitLab 11.6 include:

• Geo now constantly reverifies repositories
• Finalizing Hashed Storage GA

Omnibus improvements

• Postgres is now installed in a directory under its major version name, so updates within a major version no longer require a restart of the database.
• GitLab now supports connecting to Redis over SSL (rediss://).
• The omnibus-gitlab container image’s sshd config now supports Git Protocol v2 by default.
• GitLab 11.6 includes Mattermost 5.5, an open source Slack-alternative whose newest release includes several bug fixes and performance improvements.
• postgres has been updated to 9.6.11, ruby to 2.5.3, docker-distribution with a partial set of 2.7.0 commits.
• prometheus has been updated 2.5.0, prometheus-storage-migrator to 0.2.0, postgres-exporter to 0.4.7, and pgbouncer-exporter to 0.0.4.

Subscription details for Groups on GitLab.com

For paid plans on GitLab.com, we want to make it easy to understand the status of your subscription.

In 11.6, we have improved the Billing section underneath a group’s Settings page to include details on your group’s plan. Now, you can easily find your group’s current and past seat use, as well as the start and end date of your subscription.

Promote issue to an epic

Software development is a creative process involving the whole team, and ideas should be welcome from everyone. Ideas that emerge as issues can now freely flow up into epics with the new issue promotion feature.

You can now promote an issue to an epic simply by using a new quick action. Just type /promote in a comment on the issue and hit Comment. This will close the issue, and copy over the content of the issue into a new epic, in the immediate parent group of the issue’s project. Labels, participants, and even upvotes/downvotes will be copied over to the newly created epic, in addition to the title, description, and comment thread itself.

Per-user saved sort order in issues, merge requests, and epics

There are now user-specified sort order selections in issues, merge requests, epics, and even roadmap views. Which type of attribute you choose to sort by, and in which order you choose to sort (ascending or descending), is saved to the system, so that when you return to the same type of object list, it will remain what you have selected previously.

Similar issues

As projects grow and more issues are created, often the same issues are created again and again.

To help people find answers faster, and save maintainers time, similar issues are now shown when creating a new issue. In particular, they are shown when entering the title in the new issue web form. This will help users see similar issues right away, and allow them to navigate to them, and participate in those existing conversations immediately, allowing for more collaboration in GitLab.

Pipelines can now be deleted by project maintainers using API

Deleting a pipeline is now possible using the API, which allows for cases where perhaps secrets have been leaked in a pipeline, many unneeded pipelines have been created, or other issues have occurred where pipelines need to be deleted.

Single email notification for Merge Request Reviews

Code review is an essential practice of every successful project, but receiving email notifications for each comment can be overwhelming. Reviews now only send a single email notification listing all the feedback to help keep your inbox tidy.

Reviews, added in GitLab 11.4, make code review easier, allowing comments to be drafted, reviewed, and submitted in a single action.

This feature is available on GitLab.com today, and can be enabled for self-managed GitLab instances using the batch_review_notification feature flag. It will be enabled by default for self-managed instances in GitLab 11.7.

User profile popovers

In this release, we introduce enriched popovers when hovering over a username, starting with issue and merge request pages. While we previously only displayed the full name, you can now view the user’s full name, ID, company, and location information, as well as their status if available.

Besides providing this extended tooltip on further pages, we are working on follow-up enhancements for issue and merge request tooltips that will be available shortly.

HTTPS Support for Auto DevOps

Auto DevOps aims to solve the many challenges posed when delivering quality software. GitLab 11.6 furthers its capabilities by adding HTTPS support.

Using Cert-manager for Kubernetes, Auto DevOps will automatically serve applications over HTTPS, providing increased security for your applications.

Show Kubernetes HTTP response code

To aid troubleshooting the installation of GitLab-managed apps in your Kubernetes cluster, our integration will now return the HTTP response code from Kubernetes, so resolving issues will be easier and faster.

Disable impersonation of users by admins

For some organizations, allowing admin impersonation presents a security risk since the actions of administrators are attributed to the user they are impersonating. In order to address this, we’re adding a configurable option to disable admin impersonations.

Auto DevOps support for Group Security Dashboard

In GitLab 11.5 we released the Group Security Dashboard where SAST results are displayed.

With 11.6, we update the Auto DevOps template with the latest version of the SAST job definition, and now results are fully compatible with the Group Security Dashboard, so users can enjoy both features at the same time.

Note: The new SAST job definition requires GitLab Runner 11.5 or above, you can read more details in this blog post.

GitLab Runner 11.6

We’re also releasing GitLab Runner 11.6 today! GitLab Runner is the open source project that is used to run your CI/CD jobs and send the results back to GitLab.

Most interesting changes:

• Docker executor: use DNS, DNSSearch and ExtraHosts settings from configuration
• Fix some invalid links in documentation
• Make k8s object names DNS-1123 compatible

A list of all changes can be found in GitLab Runner’s CHANGELOG.

Performance improvements

We continue to improve the performance of GitLab with every release, for GitLab instances of every size.

In GitLab 11.6 we have significantly reduced the memory usage of the ReactiveCaching worker by switching to Nokogiri for XML parsing, and we’ve halved the compressed payload size of the merge request discussions endpoint.

These and other noteworthy performance improvements include:

• Improve the rendering performance of new and current merge request discussions by reducing the number of dependencies on each discussion object
• Improve merge request discussions endpoint size by removing unused data
• Improve performance of projects API by removing N+1 RPC calls to get readme_url
• Improve performance of issue boards on first load
• Improve performance of ReactiveCaching worker by changing XML parser

The chart shows the reduction in memory usage by the ReactiveCaching worker since deploying GitLab 11.6 to GitLab.com.