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 as small and elegant as Unix's awk and sed, but each component has a single purpose. You can find a high-level overview of these components in the following diagram:
Gitlab started as a pure Ruby on Rails application, but some components were later redesigned using Go. Ruby on Rails is a development framework built on top of the Ruby programming language. It implements a model-view-controller pattern and offers methods to connect to different databases (for example, ActiveRecord). It values convention over configuration and don't-repeat-yourself (DRY) programming. It is very well suited to rapid development, and at the...
