Emphasizing the “why” over the “how”

Before we get started, a word of warning. For the most part, this book will not lead you through step-by-step instructions on what to click in the GitLab GUI in order to perform various operations.

First, instructions for most operations are already well covered in GitLab’s official documentation, which is remarkably clear and thorough.

Second, because GitLab is in rapid development, its GUI often changes. These changes are rarely radical, workflow-breaking changes, but they are significant enough that screenshots, or even bullet-pointed instructions for how to perform operations, can quickly get stale. This means that any concrete instructions in this book could become confusing or impossible to follow, or potentially even lead to data loss, as the GitLab GUI drifts over time. To avoid that problem, we’ll mostly focus on why you might want to use different GitLab features. Although we’ll give...