Mastering GitLab 12

Implement DevOps culture and repository management solutions

Joost Evertse

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789534061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Software Development
• Index: Computer Science

An expert guide to helping you use DevOps techniques with the latest GitLab version to optimize and manage your software workflow

Key Features

• Delve into GitLab's architecture, and install and configure it to fit your environment
• Learn about the underlying principles of Agile software development and DevOps
• Explore Gitlab's features to manage enterprise cloud-native applications and services

Book Description

GitLab is an open source repository management and version control toolkit with functions for enterprises and personal software projects. It offers configurability options, extensions, and APIs that make it an ideal tool for enterprises to manage the software development life cycle.

This book begins by explaining GitLab options and the components of the GitLab architecture. You will learn how to install and set up GitLab on-premises and in the cloud, along with understanding how to migrate code bases from different systems, such as GitHub, Concurrent Versions System, Team Foundation Version Control, and Subversion. Later chapters will help you implement DevOps culture by introducing the workflow management tools in GitLab and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD). In addition to this, the book will guide you through installing GitLab on a range of cloud platforms, monitoring with Prometheus, and deploying an environment with GitLab. You'll also focus on the GitLab CI component to assist you with creating development pipelines and jobs, along with helping you set up GitLab runners for your own project. Finally, you will be able to choose a high availability setup that fits your needs and helps you monitor and act on results obtained after testing.

By the end of this book, you will have gained the expertise you need to use GitLab features effectively, and be able to integrate all phases in the development process.

What you will learn

• Install GitLab on premises and in the cloud using a variety of configurations
• Conduct data migration from the SVN, TFS, CVS, and GitHub platforms to GitLab
• Use GitLab runners to develop different types of configurations in software development
• Plan and perform CI/CD by using GitLab features
• Monitor and secure your software architecture using Prometheus and Grafana
• Implement DevOps culture by introducing workflow management tools in GitLab

Who this book is for

If you are a software developer, DevOps professional, or any developer who wants to master GitLab for productive repository management in your day-to-day tasks, this book is for you. Basic understanding of the software development workflow is assumed.

Section 1: Install and Set Up GitLab On-Premises or in the Cloud

This section will give you a solid understanding of GitLab deployment options and GitLab component architecture, leaving you able to install and configure GitLab on-premises and in the cloud.

This section comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Introducing the GitLab Architecture
• Chapter 2, Installing GitLab
• Chapter 3, Configuring GitLab Using the Web UI
• Chapter 4, Configuring GitLab from the Terminal

Introducing the GitLab Architecture

Understanding the context of the GitLab project will help us to appreciate the choices that were made with regard to the design of the GitLab workflow. The GitLab project started out as a small, open source project, and has grown to be an organization of 400 people and thousands of volunteers. It is currently available in two versions, a free Community Edition (CE) and an Enterprise Edition (EE) with a proprietary license. There are several tiers of support for the enterprise version. Although it is proprietary licensed, the source code for that version is publicly available from GitLab.

To master GitLab, it is necessary to have a solid understanding of its individual components. In this chapter, we will look at the basic components of a GitLab installation, paying special attention to GitLab Continuous Integration (CI) and the accompanying runners. As the different components can be distributed across servers or even cloud providers, we will also provide an overview of those providers and how GitLab views them.

In this chapter, we will be covering the following topics:

• The origins of GitLab
• GitLab CE or EE
• The core components of GitLab
• GitLab CI
• GitLab Runners
• Cloud native

Technical requirements

To follow along with the instructions in this chapter, please download the Git repository with examples, commands and instructions, available at GitHub: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-GitLab-12/tree/master/Chapter01. Look in the Readme.md file for a general explanation of the content of the directory.

To run or install software used in this chapter you need one of the following platforms:

• Debian 10 Linux codename 'Buster'
• CentOS 7.x or RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 7.x
• macOS Sierra or later

The origins of GitLab

The story began in 2011, when Dimitri Zaporozhets, a web programmer from Ukraine, was faced with a common problem. He wanted to switch to Git for version management and GitHub to collaborate, but that was not allowed in his company. He needed a tool that did not hinder him in developing code and was easy to use. Like many developers, he had issues with the collaboration tool that he was obliged to use. To get around those issues, he created his side project in Ruby on Rails: GitLab. Together with his colleague, Valery Sizov, he developed this project alongside his regular work.

After this initiative, the project grew enormously:

Date	Fact
2011	Sytze Sybrandij, the future CEO of GitLab, is impressed by the GitLab project and code, and offers Zaporozhets the opportunity to try to commercialize it via https://about.gitlab.com/.
2012	GitLab was announced to a broader audience via Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4428278).
2013	Dimitri Zaporozhets decides to work full-time on GitLab and joins the company.
2015	GitLab becomes part of the Y Combinator class and received VC funding that year.
2018	GitLab receives another $100 million of VC funding and is valued at $1 billion.
2019	The GitLab company employs over 600 employees.

The initial idea of GitLab was to earn money from open source technology by offering support services. However, what happened was that companies started to bring in consultants only to upgrade GitLab, and then they would stop the service contract. It became clear that going for a 100% open source was not going to be competitive. Instead of this, therefore, they chose open core. Under open core, a company releases a core software system under an open source license. A different version of the software is sold under a commercial license and contains more features.

So, GitLab was split up into two editions: an open source version, and an enterprise version.

Exploring GitLab editions – CE and EE

The core of the GitLab software is called the CE. It is distributed under the MIT license, which is a permissive free software license created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You are allowed to modify the software and use it in your creations.

No feature that ever made it to CE will ever be removed, or moved to a closed source version. When GitLab EE was created in 2013, it was, at its core, GitLab CE, but it had additional enterprise features, such as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) groups. Those features are not open source, per se, but can be added to the core version if they are perceived by the company as a core feature. The idea was that companies should also contribute as much as possible to solving problems and creating new features.

In 2016, the GitLab EE product was divided into three tiers: Starter, Premium, and Ultimate. Each tier is about five times more expensive than the previous one and contains more features and support options, as mentioned in the following table:

Version	Features (short list)
Starter	Everything on core GitLab CE: CI/CD Project Issue Board Mattermost integrations Time tracking GitLab pages
Premium	More enterprise features such as the following: Maven and NPM repository functionality Protected environments Burndown charts Multiple LDAP servers and Active Directory support
Ultimate	All options, including the following: All security scanning tools Epics Free guest users Web terminal for the web IDE

GitLab has a lot of features, but let's concentrate first on the basic building blocks.

The core system components of GitLab

GitLab is not a monolithic application. It tries to follow the Unix philosophy, which means that a software module should do only one particular thing, and do it well. The components that GitLab is made of are not...