Source code management enables coordination, sharing and collaboration across the entire software development team. Track and merge branches, audit changes and enable concurrent work, to accelerate software delivery.
Sign up for GitLab.comVersion control in GitLab helps your development team share, collaborate and maximize their productivity with world class source code management (SCM). Leveraging the industry-leading, open source, distributed version control system Git, GitLab makes your developers more efficient, effective and responsive. Source code management is a critical part of the DevOPs lifecycle, allowing teams to manage their work with a single source of truth.
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GitLab can import projects and issues from more sources (GitHub, Bitbucket, Google Code, FogBugz, Gitea and from any git URL) than GitHub or any other VCS. We even have you covered for your move from SVN to Git with comprehensive guides and documentation.
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In GitLab, you can quickly create a new branch from an issue on the issue tracker. It will include the issue number and title automatically, making it easy to track which branch belongs to which issue.
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When a user opens a merge request from a fork, they are given the option to allow upstream maintainers to collaborate with them on the source branch. This allows the maintainers of the upstream project to make small fixes or rebase branches before merging, reducing the back and forth of accepting community contributions.
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With this setting at the project level, you can ensure that no merge commits are created and all merges are fast-forwarded. When a fast-forward merge is not possible, the user is given the option to rebase.
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When a project requires multiple sign-offs, GitLab Enterprise Edition enables you to make sure every merge request is approved by one or more people. Merge request approvals allow you to set the number of necessary approvals and predefine a list of approvers that will need to approve every merge request in a project, and in-turn improve your code’s quality.
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Working with multiple people on the same file can be a risk. Conflicts when merging a non-text file are hard to overcome and will require a lot of manual work to resolve. With GitLab Enterprise Edition Premium, File Locking helps you avoid merge conflicts and better manage your binary files by preventing everyone, except you, from modifying a specific file or entire directory.
Learn more about File Locking
When development teams are spread across two or more geographical locations, but their GitLab instance is in a single location, fetching and cloning large repositories can take a long time. Built for distributed teams, GitLab Geo allows for read-only mirrors of your GitLab instance, reducing the time it takes to clone and fetch large repos and improving your collaboration process.
Learn more about GitLab Geo
Prevent merge requests from accidentally being accepted before they’re completely ready by marking them as Work In Progress (WIP). This gives you all the code review power of merge requests, while protecting unfinished work.
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Leverage the power of Git Hooks and chain them together to fire off custom scripts when certain actions occur on the repository. If the commit is declined or an error occurs during the Git hook check, the error message of the hook will be present in GitLab’s UI. GitLab supports all types of hooks.
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Manage large files such as audio, video and graphics files with the help of Git LFS. Git LFS 2.0 file locking support helps large teams work with binary assets and is integrated with our native file locking feature.
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When creating a new project, you can choose to kickstart your project from a predefined template that already has some working example code and CI preconfigured. In addition, you can define a custom project templates by assigning a group. Child projects of this group are available as templates when creating a new project.
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Having Geo replicated server(s) can make local pulls go more quickly, but without support for Geolocation-aware DNS, developers need to reconfigure their tools manually to point to their nearest geo replicated server. Users using Geolocation-aware DNS can be transparently directed to the closest server available and can access repository data faster.
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A repository can be initialized with an example README when creating a new project. If this option is checked, a project repository is initialized with a default master branch which can be cloned right away.
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When browsing through project repositories on GitLab, having direct access to single files is a relevant use case. A ‘Download’ button in the file viewer allows you to download individual files from the GitLab UI.
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Assign Code Owners to files to indicate the team members responsible for
code in your project using a CODEOWNERS file. Code owners are assigned
automatically as merge request approvers, can be set as required and
shown when viewing files.
Draft multiple comments in a merge request code review, before reviewing and submitting them together all at once. This allows you to review code in consistent, and self-contained sessions, instead of as individual comments.
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GitLab is meant to be the best place for any software project. The team behind GitLab is addressing issues that maintainers and contributors to large open source projects are facing, to make it easier to do both.
Making GitLab better for large open source projects
