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...
