GitLab for Open Source

GitLab helps you onboard newcomers to your project faster and more easily than ever with a single tool for all aspects of your software development lifecycle.

Not only created for developers, GitLab enables cross-functional team collaboration. It’s a perfect tool for Design, Documentaion, Engagement, and Governance teams alike. GitLab’s user-friendly and inclusive design makes it easier to attract and retain contributors from diverse backgrounds to help your open source project thrive.

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) help you cut down on manual work and increase automation. That way, you can build and deploy great quality software more quickly.

Since GitLab CI is fully integrated, it allows you to get set up faster and provides a seamless experience. GitLab for Open Source members get 50,000 CI pipeline minutes per month for free.

Using GitLab CI with one of our top tiers provides you with best-in-class functionality. However, if your FOSS community is using another source code management platform, we still encourage you to use GitLab CI!

With Security baked into our CI pipelines, you get a robust set of application security scans. All of the results are provided for development teams in the Merge Request view, and can be managed in the security dashboard by security teams.

Still deciding? We encourage you to learn more about how GitLab CI compares to other popular CI providers such as Travis CI and Circle CI and see for yourself.

You can choose to host your open source project on GitLab.com or self-host your own instance. Each of these options has powerful features to enable you to develop enterprise-grade software at scale.

In alignment with our Transparency value, all of GitLab’s code is source-available and the open source components of GitLab are published under an MIT open source license. The open source distribution is available to dowload here and contains all the same features as our Free tier.

GitLab’s Open Source Partners, are leveraging GitLab’s top tier in both SaaS and self-managed instances, as well as leveraging the power of GitLab’s open source distribution. They serve as examples of how large open source communities can thrive with GitLab.

If you have any questions, please reach out to us via opensource@gitlab.com.