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Comment by matteeyah | Hacker News Reader

Glad to hear you're interested Silhouette!

> what exactly is GitLab?

Here's a couple of points that might shed some more light on it: https://about.gitlab.com/about/.

IMHO the first point nails it pretty well: "GitLab is a single application with features for the whole software development and operations (DevOps) lifecycle."

> I've always found the web site more confusing than enlightening.

Did you take a look at our homepage (https://about.gitlab.com) recently? (we updated it not too long ago)

Which part of it do you find confusing? We'd love to make it better. If more direct feedback is your thing, you can also open an issue about it in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/new?issu...

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Thanks for replying. I did actually check your home page, and various others on the site, before commenting. The best way I can think of to describe my experience is that it feels like I'm reading something written for someone who already knows what they're looking for and what the context is, but that's exactly what I'm there to find out.

Perhaps some examples would help. For context, I am about to set up the infrastructure for a new project, involving source control, issue tracking, testing, deployment and so on. From past discussions with friends and colleagues who have used GitLab, I had the impression that it was somewhat like GitHub, in the sense of providing a front-end to help manage Git repos and some related facilities like issue tracking and CI, but GitLab was based on OSS and could be hosted locally. So, GitLab seems like something I should be very interested in right now. I'm an experienced developer and familiar with many other tools, so my interest is in whether GitLab might offer a better approach than things we've used before.

However, looking at the site, I can't find anything describing the relationship between GitLab and Git anywhere on the home page. I checked the features page, but again found nothing, aside from a few passing references to actions like merging but only in the context of other functionality. I tried putting "git" into the search box on the documentation page, but again, nothing. Have I just totally misunderstood what GitLab does? And if so, why "Git" in the name?

Likewise, I honestly can't tell whether GitLab is an OSS project or some sort of hosted enterprise "call us for pricing" behemoth (or both or neither). I've seen references to open source and some sort of community edition, but the "Community" link on the top of the site is clearly about something else entirely. There's a pricing page with various plans including a free plan, but while I initially assumed they were for a hosted online service, apparently they're for self-hosted. There is information about many ways to install GitLab locally on different platforms, but it's not clear what you're actually installing at that point or whether you then need some sort of licence to do anything with it. On the features page, each item has two different scales under it, one for GitLab and one for GitLab.com, but I really have no idea what the relationship between those is. There is an entirely separate feature comparison table that is actually linked from the pricing page, but that only shows one of the scales, and suggests that the lower/free tier is quite restrictive. But these look like they're self-hosted options and if there's OSS involved then how does that restriction work?

I hope you'll forgive the brain dump, but other than showing a stream of consciousness as I looked through the site earlier today and how I was unable to answer my two most basic questions, I can't think of a better way to illustrate the difficulty I encountered.

I use the community edition of Gitlab at work and the cloud version for personal projects.

Gitlab is a web interface for git. It is like Github, but much better. Gitlab also includes a great CI server (a bit like travis ci, or circle ci). It has a docker registry if you need that. It has issue tracking if you want to use that.

There is an open source free community version that does most things. There is also an enterprise version if you need permissions managed by Active Directory or something like that. And there is a cloud-hosted version if you don't want to host your own instance.

I hope that helps a bit.

I'll try and clear up any confusion you might have about GitLab. Feel free to ask more questions if I left something out.

> I can't find anything describing the relationship between GitLab and Git anywhere on the home page.

The relation between git and GitLab is that GitLab is a front-end for git. However, it's so much more than that. We strive to offer features that encompass the whole DevOps lifecycle - see https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#scope for more context.

We have an integrated CI/CD system, issue tracker with boards and epics, built-in container registry, monitoring and many many others. All of them are listed in https://about.gitlab.com/features/

> Likewise, I honestly can't tell whether GitLab is an OSS project or some sort of hosted enterprise "call us for pricing" behemoth

GitLab Community Edition (CE) is a completely open-source project - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce . It's MIT licensed.

We offer a proprietary version with added features - GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee . It has a proprietary license. Even though it's proprietary, Enterprise Edition is source-visible i.e. you can browse the source.

> There's a pricing page with various plans including a free plan, but while I initially assumed they were for a hosted online service, apparently they're for self-hosted.

There's both a hosted solution (GitLab.com) and the option of self-hosting. The pricing page has two tabs - one for self-hosted options and the other for GitLab.com

> There is information about many ways to install GitLab locally on different platforms, but it's not clear what you're actually installing at that point or whether you then need some sort of licence to do anything with it.

No matter which package of GitLab (Community Edition or Enterprise Edition) you install locally, you'll always be able to access the free tier of features without a license.

> On the features page, each item has two different scales under it, one for GitLab and one for GitLab.com, but I really have no idea what the relationship between those is.

There's four feature / pricing tiers for self-hosted instances: Core (Free), Starter, Premium and Ultimate. From left to right, every tier has more features than the previous one. The distribution of features is documented in https://about.gitlab.com/features/ (upper scale).

If you opt for a hosted solution on GitLab.com, there's also 4 pricing / feature tiers: Free, Bronze, Silver and Gold. All public projects have access to Gold-tier features for free. The feature distribution between these tiers is also documented in https://about.gitlab.com/features/ (lower scale).

> There is an entirely separate feature comparison table that is actually linked from the pricing page, but that only shows one of the scales, and suggests that the lower/free tier is quite restrictive.

We prioritize features for one of the paid tiers if we think the feature is more relevant for larger organizations.

You can find out more about our stewardship of the open-source GitLab CE project at: https://about.gitlab.com/stewardship/

Thanks for following up.

The relation between git and GitLab is that GitLab is a front-end for git. However, it's so much more than that.

I understand that there are lots of other features, but if I could make one suggestion to help improve the site, it would be to make that basic relationship clear -- or indeed evident at all. Apparently I did have the right general idea about what GitLab was, but I was expecting a front-end to Git to be #1 on the features page, and the rest to follow. Likewise I was expecting to find "getting started" documentation explaining things like whether Git needs to be installed independently of GitLab and where repositories are stored and how GitLab is integrated with them. In practice, I didn't find any of this in about half an hour of looking around the site, and so in effect what actually happened is that I turned up interested and having the right sort of idea and left thinking I'd totally misunderstood and GitLab wasn't what I was looking for at all. Probably not quite the result you were hoping for!

Hi, I'm rooting for Gitlab. Love your product, team, and particularly the way you all communicate with your customers.

But the root problem may be that the name "Gitlab" does not convey "Full Devops Solution". "Gitlab" the name is memorable, easy-to-spell, but having "Git" as a prefix might make it just a hair too narrow for what the product wants to be.

I am a sample size of one, so unless others have also been confused by the name, please feel free to keep on trucking.

Isn't the main feature still Git-hosting? I think the name is fine.

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