Introduction

GitLab is a self-hosted system for managing your code. It was first released in October 2011, and is updated every twenty-second day of the month since then. It was released under the MIT license.

It used to be hosted on GitHub, but since January 2014, its main source of hosting is gitlab.com. The fork of GitLab, which is hosted on GitHub, will remain active as a source where you can file issues and merge requests.

GitLab was founded by Dmitriy Zaporozhets in 2013. He has worked on GitLab full-time since 2013. The project consists of two main groups: on one side, the open source core team, and on the other side, the GitLab B.V. team (the second one is the company side of GitLab).

Besides the amazing project management tool for Git projects, the GitLab Continuous Integration (CI) system also exists; this is a CI system that highly integrates with GitLab.

In this book, we will be using the Community Edition (CE) of GitLab. The CE version is the free open source version that you can download. There is also an enterprise version. The enterprise version includes a support subscription where the GitLab B.V. team helps you with problems with the installation of it.

If you want to give GitLab a try, or just don't want to host it yourself, take a look at gitlab.com. You can find the hosted version of GitLab there. It's run by the team behind GitLab B.V., so you know you're in good hands!