I'm grateful to GitLab for providing an alternative to GitHub, and an open source one. It's an open core product with the community edition providing a lot of value. Here are some community hosted instances: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/List_of_Community-Hosted_GitL...
The CI system is quite powerful, and Travis CI's struggles before and after acquisition has shown that it's hard to host a major CI platform.
I hope the company and the open source product will continue to thrive.
I really wanted to like gitlab, but have had so many reliability issues. The UI thinking the source branch doesn’t exist, CI jobs not running for hours etc.
Haha that UI branch name thing is hilarious. Everyone at work has the same problem and has had it for the year and a half we have been using gitlab but the gitlab devs insist it doesn't happen for them.
You can workaround it by pressing the right arrow at the end of the text.
I've been using GL at work for many years now and while it has many faults (the MR comment/thread/discussion UX is atrocious for example), I don't think I stumbled across this one. What is it about?
(I still like GL, and I much prefer their CI to GH Actions - I just wish they would put more effort in improving existing features)
On that blue "create merge request" button on the issue page, there is a drop down arrow to let you pick a branch to start from. That text input is super buggy and often says the branch does not exist even if the name is correct.
Interesting, I never noticed because I usually make a MR from the link I get when I do a git push (which I find super useful btw). It does sound like a myriad other smallish annoyances. Thanks for describing it!
Some times when trying to merge in a MR, the UI will say the source branch doesn’t exist so the MR can’t be merged. Wait a bit and it usually resolves itself. But it’s super annoying when you are in a rush.
Yes, Gitlab has been leading the way for a while now, consistently introducing new features that Github eventually copies. It's a real testament to the power of competition. I first started using Gitlab due to free private repositories, which Github eventually added. Gitlab had free built-in CI/CD first, and Github eventually followed. I'm still on Gitlab these days despite Github catching up, and still enjoying features like organizations with subfolders that Github lacks.
Yeah also a doubter, you can get to pretty DRY workflows with GitLab extends, caching is great, built in artifact repositories (including image registry), workflows/rules on when to build (i.e. run certain tasks specifically off MRs), granular approval rules, review environments and the paid for version has pretty awesome security primitives that are really easy to incorporate (sast/dast/container scanning et al.). I may be a bit biased but having kicked the tyres on actions my feeling is GL is miles ahead on the CI front.
Ha ha, no way. Very basic things (like caching) are riddled with bugs and (undocumented) limitations. Documentation is poor compared to GL, there are much less features and UI is confusing at best. GH needs to do better if they want to compete here.
It really is, they one-upped Gitlab, and you can tell there is a clear difference in resources between the two companies. Yay competition! I especially like how you can run parallel builds on Windows, Mac, and Linux with one line of code with GitHub actions.
What’s nice about Git as a distributed VCS is I can use both GitHub and Gitlab and get the best of both worlds very easily. I win either way, and neither can lock me in (you know Microsoft would do it if they could, but they can’t). Therefore we see actual legitimate competition, where one has to constantly improve to outdo the other. I wish more things worked that way.
It can only be true if you had experience with Gitlab CI 5 years ago and compare with current Github Action offering. There is no way a person who actually build CI pipelines in Gitlab and Github today can call Github a winner.
GitLab pages started with the incredible idea that you could provide your own docker container and use the CI to build using whatever tools you want while github only supported jekyl at the time.
These all sound like features that GitHub also had, but Gitlab needed to offer for free to gain users, rather than a technological superiority of Gitlab over GitHub. I don't think it's correct to interpret that as "Gitlab leading the way".
Note: I've preferred Gitlab, for exactly this reason
Ah, yeah...sorry. There is a history tab where you can see the users that last updated it. Though the page appears to be untouched for a couple of years, so that may not pan out.
The CI system is quite powerful, and Travis CI's struggles before and after acquisition has shown that it's hard to host a major CI platform.
I hope the company and the open source product will continue to thrive.