GitLab 10.6 released with CI/CD for GitHub and deeper Kubernetes integration

This month’s Most Valuable Person (MVP) is Takuya Noguchi

This release’s MVP is Takuya Noguchi. Takuya implemented a re-designed and extremely useful branches page in GitLab, making it much easier to manage active versus stale branches, especially in large projects with many ongoing branches.

Thank you, Takuya for your contribution! We’ve sent Takuya some GitLab swag as a thank you, including a hoodie, socks, and a handmade tanuki.

GitLab CI/CD for external repos

In 2011, GitLab started out as a code repo alone. Since then, we’ve built an application for the complete DevOps lifecycle that includes rich capabilities for testing, security, packaging, deployment, and monitoring. With this newest release, you can now use GitLab for CI, or even CD and monitoring, all while your application code is hosted in an external repo.

To use GitLab CI/CD with a GitHub repository create a new GitLab project. On the CI/CD for external repo tab, click GitHub to sign in and select your GitHub repo. Once you add a .gitlab-ci.yml file to your repo (or enable Auto DevOps), GitLab will automatically run pipelines and update the commit status in GitHub.

You can also connect to any Git repo via URL and configure status webhooks manually. For example, if you’re using Bitbucket, read how to manually enable GitLab CI/CD.

To celebrate this release, we’re offering this feature promotionally as part of GitLab.com Free through March 2019.

Read through the documentation on CI/CD for external repos

Other Improvements in GitLab 10.6

Deprecations

Mattermost configuration changes

With the release of GitLab 11.0, the number of Mattermost configuration options supported within gitlab.rb will be reduced. We will continue to support the core configuration settings necessary to run Mattermost, and set up the integration with GitLab. Going forward, other configuration settings should be set directly within the Mattermost console, or passed as environment variables.

Presently with two applications attempting to write to the same config file, changes can be lost.

Due: GitLab 11.0.

The legacy gitlab Helm chart

The legacy gitlab Helm chart is deprecated. For installations on Kubernetes today, we recommend the beta gitlab-omnibus Helm chart.

A new cloud native GitLab chart is in development with increased scalability, resilience, and other benefits. This chart will replace both existing charts when generally available later this year.

For more information on GitLab Helm charts, please read the documentation on installing GitLab on Kubernetes.

Due: March 22, 2018.

Upgrade barometer

To upgrade to GitLab 10.6 from the latest 10.5 version, no downtime is required.

For this release we have migrations and post-deploy migrations.

GitLab.com migrations took approximately 30 minutes and post-deploy migrations accounted for about 10 minutes.

GitLab Geo users, please consult the documentation on upgrading Geo.

Cover image licensed under Unsplash free license