Moving to GitLab: Yes, it's worth it • Hacker News Board

Re: Moving to GitLab: Yes, it's worth it

#31

Post by jobvandervoort » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 12:17 PM UTC

romanr wrote: post #28

What is the benefit of moving to Gitlab from Bitbucket (or Github) for private repos? Same feature set, Gitlab cost more per user and on top of all you have to run your own server? Am I missing something here?

I'll leave the marketing talk to less biased people here, but do note that:

- you can use GitLab.com for free: unlimited public and private repositories, unlimited collaborators, free hosting of your Docker images, free hosting of your static site with any static site generator and free CI / CD

- GitLab CE is fully open source (MIT Expat). You can easily install it anywhere you want.

Re: Moving to GitLab: Yes, it's worth it

#32

Post by krautsourced » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 12:19 PM UTC

I really liked Gitlab when last I tried it, but in the end I went with https://gogs.io/ instead. For a small-ish team this felt like the most straight forward self-hosted solution. Still missing LFS though, which sucks, but it's being worked on.

Re: Moving to GitLab: Yes, it's worth it

#33

Post by microcolonel » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 12:20 PM UTC

jobvandervoort wrote: post #4

As always, we're happy to answer any questions about GitLab.

I feel as though some of the recent UI changes were cosmetic and degraded the experience. I was especially unhappy about the sidebar being pushed into a hamburger menu (which can be pinned open, mind you).

I'd really like for UI updates in the future not to be jarring and seemingly pointless. I really liked the UI right before the overhaul, only minor tweaks seemed truly necessary. Many of the tweaks I would have suggested before have come through; such as putting profile information and notifications in the upper right hand corner. I'm glad about that.

Other than that; I'd like to say that I have really liked using Pivotal Tracker for developing software. It has a rigid pipeline between requirements and results. Configurability ruins some productivity tools. It would be swell to have something like "Pivotal Tracker lite" associated with GitLab (in that GitLab CI is). It's not a difficult kind of software to do reasonably well, and it would make GitLab the ultimate software project productivity suite.

Re: Moving to GitLab: Yes, it's worth it

#34

Post by Svenskunganka » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 12:20 PM UTC

jobvandervoort wrote: post #4

As always, we're happy to answer any questions about GitLab.

Was over a year since I last used GitLab, and I wonder if the resource usage and response times of a self-hosted instance has improved? Back then we were 3 developers having roughly 20 repos. The memory usage was over 2GB when idle and response times were at best between 2-3 seconds.

Testing your hosted version, loading this page[1] for example takes 4 seconds (3.6s TTFB). Don't get me wrong, the platform and its features are very broad and very good, but I personally can't stand having such long loading times. It's very frustrating because I really want to use GitLab and its features.

My feedback would be to set a main focus on reducing the TTFB for the Web UI, but also the Git server, because it takes a couple of seconds for it to respond to pushes.

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/commits/master

Re: Moving to GitLab: Yes, it's worth it

#35

Post by sdesol » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 12:23 PM UTC

jobvandervoort wrote: post #12

sdesol wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there anything we can do from our side Addressing this issue will go a long way, in making it easier for others to create solutions that can easily integrate with GitLab. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20567

Great, thanks. For the upcoming release (8.11, August 22nd), we're adding deploy keys with push permissions [0]. This would allow you to basically do the same thing. That said, that doesn't make it very clear that you can use these for this purpose, so I've added a note to re-evaluate these. We're also expanding OAuth scopes, potentially making it easier / more attractive to integrate [1]. [0]: https://gitlab.com/git…

Since I have your attention, something else that I think should be on your radar is creating/defining supported injection points in GitLab's UI. If you haven't done so, you should look at what Microsoft has done with Visual Studio Team Services.

By providing supported injection points in GitLab's UI, GitLab will be able to signal to others, that they are a solution you can safely build on top of.

Re: Moving to GitLab: Yes, it's worth it

#36

Post by icebraining » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 12:24 PM UTC

chrisan wrote: post #29

How about costs compared to Bitbucket? I appreciate what you guys are doing but I think Github is cashing in on their brand and for a while they had the best UX (they still might! but I no longer care anymore as all the competitors are "good enough" for me) which lets them set a high premium people will pay. However, I think it's unfair to leave out Bitbucket, they have come a long way. The first example of 8 develop…

Very little time, in my experience. unattended-upgrades takes care of most security updates, a gitlab update is just "aptitude update && aptitude install gitlab-ce", and it automatically handles offsite backups.

Re: Moving to GitLab: Yes, it's worth it

#37

Post by alexwebb2 » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 12:25 PM UTC

jobvandervoort wrote: post #4

As always, we're happy to answer any questions about GitLab.

I just finished an evaluation of Gitlab for our company and I'm blown away by all the awesome little touches that are geared toward productivity (merge requests that can be merged to a second branch with two clicks? yes please!).

That said, I'm holding off for now because I'd love for it to replace both Github and our current ticketing system, and rather than doing two migrations, I'd rather wait a few months until you guys have fleshed that out and do it all at once. The issue boards on your roadmap look absolutely fantastic, but the true killer feature I'm waiting on is time tracking, which I'm hoping makes it in later this year. Get that in and I think you'll see people flock to Gitlab.

Re: Moving to GitLab: Yes, it's worth it

#38

Post by kmch » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 12:26 PM UTC

jobvandervoort wrote: post #5

jsingleton wrote: post #3

I've moved from BitBucket to GitLab and on the whole it works well. I still use GitHub for open source projects though. One problem is that a lot of things automatically work with BitBucket and GitHub but GitLab need manual setup. For example, TeamCity has out-of-the-box support for both BitBucket and GitHub but you have to set up GitLab as a raw git repository (and create a user for it etc.). edit: I should add that…

Is there anything we can do from our side? We're very interested in making it easier to integrate with GitLab, but also happy to invest some time into making existing integrations easier to set up. Our hope is that with time, it'll become obvious that when developing an application, you integrate with GitLab as well as with BB and GH.

Maybe create a plugin for Visual Studio, like GitHub does. Also try to work with JetBrains to make their GitHub plugin work with GitLab? The GitHub plugin is available during installation, both with Visual Studio and JetBrains products, which makes it much more convenient to use. Things like creating a gist from code in IntelliJ or PyCharm also work out of the box with github.

Re: Moving to GitLab: Yes, it's worth it

#39

Post by alexwebb2 » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 12:26 PM UTC

Svenskunganka wrote: post #34

jobvandervoort wrote: post #4

As always, we're happy to answer any questions about GitLab.

Was over a year since I last used GitLab, and I wonder if the resource usage and response times of a self-hosted instance has improved? Back then we were 3 developers having roughly 20 repos. The memory usage was over 2GB when idle and response times were at best between 2-3 seconds. Testing your hosted version, loading this page[1] for example takes 4 seconds (3.6s TTFB). Don't get me wrong, the platform and its fea…

They've done a lot of work on performance in the past year. I'd recommend taking it for another spin.

Re: Moving to GitLab: Yes, it's worth it

#40

Post by OliverJones » Fri, Aug 05, 2016, 12:27 PM UTC

jobvandervoort wrote: post #13

OliverJones wrote: post #9

Working for a 15-year old small software company, I converted a whole bunch of ancient CVS stuff (yeah, yeah, don't laugh unless you also have 15 years of profitability) to GitLab CE. After a couple of false starts it went flawlessly and now works flawlessly. (I used the tigris.org migration tools). The GitLab team is doing a great job. Thanks you guys.

Thanks Oliver, that's great to hear. Any way we can prevent those false starts for other people?

The false starts in our conversion were mostly struggles with how to restructure our old CVS repos so they made sense in the world of git. A few of them had to do with capturing some oddball CVS specific revision and branching history.

None of the false starts were due to flaws or confusion in GitLab specifically.

I should, and if you pester me I will, sanitize our internal how-to documents and scripts and contribute them to the Gitlab community so the next guy can benefit from our experience.