GitLab is an open source, platform-independent and completely free web-based software repository and project management application implemented in Ruby on Rails and cloned from the famous GitHub project. It is used in more than 100,000 organizations worldwide and specifically engineered for the GNU/Linux platform.
Features at a glance
Being inspired by GitHub and hosted at GitHub, the GitLab project is a code hosting application that supports merge requests, comments, control repository access, network graph, code snippets, administration, Wiki and issues.
With GitLab, any application developer will be able to create projects and app repositories, do code reviews, and manage access. It helps multiple software developers to easily collaborate on code.
The application gives developers of any kind fine grained access controls to effortlessly manage Git repositories and keep their source code secure at all times. It also helps you to improve collaboration with merge requests, as well as to perform code reviews.
Another interesting feature of GitLab, is that it implements a Wiki and an issue tracker for each of your projects, making it one of the most popular solution to manage Git software repositories on-premises.
Requirements and installation
The GitLab software has been tailored specifically for the GNU/Linux platform, supporting all the major distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu. It requires Ruby 2.0 or higher, Git 1.7.10 or later, Redis 2.0 or higher, as well as the MySQL or PostgreSQL database servers.
The software is written in Ruby on Rails and distributed as a universal sources archive, allowing the user to optimize its source code for a specific operating system or hardware architecture (32-bit and 64-bit instruction set architectures are supported at this time). It is available under the MIT Expat license.
