Trying GitLab's Ultimate SaaS Trial Plan
There was Ultimate Frisbee, and now Ultimate SaaS
As a number of my clients use GitLab, I was curious about how it works and decided to sign up for the Ultimate SaaS Trial Plan to experience it myself.
After signing up, I was guided to the Learn GitLab tutorials. As a GitHub user who has seen GitLab before but never touched it, having this tutorial is really helpful.
0. Creating groups, subgroups, projects
Projects are like repositories, and we will need to have a group to contain our projects. In between a group and a project, we can have subgroups nested up to 20 levels for organisation purposes.
1. Add code
I’m not a Visual Studio Code (VSC) person, as I previously used other code editors such as Notepad++, Atom and Eclipse, within the web-based VSC integrated development environment (IDE) it took me a while before finding the commit button under source control:
2. Setting the Merge Request approval rules
Although there is just me in this trial repository, having good controls is always important, thus I enabled the 1 approval required for merge requests. In a proper team, I would check the box “Prevent approval by author” as well, so that someone has to review the code before it’s pushed to the main branch for deployment.
3. Codeowners
I also added code owners (currently just myself), for good version control.
4. CI pipelines
There is a sample CI pipeline so I just utilised that. It took quite a while to run (at least three minutes) for my tiny repository of just 2 files, but I suppose GitLab wants to allocate resources efficiently especially for trial accounts like mine, so the execution has a lower priority than paid customers. But this is just my speculation.
Overall, GitLab seems to be an important and fun tool in any professional developer’s arsenal. While for hobby developers GitHub is probably good enough, for engineering teams having a self-hosted GitLab can be invaluable to ensure the existence of maker-checker controls and avoid inappropriate changes to production code.