Administrator documentation

Learn how to administer your GitLab instance (Community Edition and Enterprise Edition). Regular users don't have access to GitLab administration tools and settings.

GitLab has two product distributions: the open source GitLab Community Edition (CE), and the open core GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE), available through different subscriptions.

You can install GitLab CE or GitLab EE, but the features you'll have access to depend on the subscription you choose (Libre, Starter, Premium, or Ultimate). GitLab Community Edition installations only have access to Libre features.

GitLab.com is administered by GitLab, Inc., therefore, only GitLab team members have access to its admin configurations. If you're a GitLab.com user, please check the user documentation.

Installing and maintaining GitLab

Learn how to install, configure, update, and maintain your GitLab instance.

Installing GitLab

Configuring GitLab

Customizing GitLab's appearance

  • Header logo: Change the logo on all pages and email headers.
  • Branded login page: Customize the login page with your own logo, title, and description.
  • Welcome message: Add a custom welcome message to the sign-in page.
  • "New Project" page: Customize the text to be displayed on the page that opens whenever your users create a new project.

Maintaining GitLab

  • Raketasks: Perform various tasks for maintenance, backups, automatic webhooks setup, etc.
  • Operations: Keeping GitLab up and running (clean up Redis sessions, moving repositories, Sidekiq Job throttling, Sidekiq MemoryKiller, Unicorn).
  • Restart GitLab: Learn how to restart GitLab and its components.

Updating GitLab

Upgrading or downgrading GitLab

GitLab platform integrations

  • Mattermost: Integrate with Mattermost, an open source, private cloud workplace for web messaging.
  • PlantUML: Create simple diagrams in AsciiDoc and Markdown documents created in snippets, wikis, and repos.
  • Web terminals: Provide terminal access to your applications deployed to Kubernetes from within GitLab's CI/CD environments.

User settings and permissions

  • Libravatar: Use Libravatar instead of Gravatar for user avatars.
  • Sign-up restrictions: block email addresses of specific domains, or whitelist only specific domains.
  • Access restrictions: Define which Git access protocols can be used to talk to GitLab (SSH, HTTP, HTTPS).
  • Authentication/Authorization: Enforce 2FA, configure external authentication with LDAP, SAML, CAS and additional Omniauth providers.
  • Reply by email: Allow users to comment on issues and merge requests by replying to notification emails.
    • Postfix for Reply by email: Set up a basic Postfix mail server with IMAP authentication on Ubuntu, to be used with Reply by email.
  • User Cohorts: Display the monthly cohorts of new users and their activities over time.

Project settings

Repository settings

Continuous Integration settings

Git configuration options

Monitoring GitLab

Performance Monitoring

Troubleshooting