Software Update: GitLab 11.4

You can compare GitLab with the more famous GitHubbut contains some subtle differences† It is an environment for managing Git repositories on-premises. It is published under the MIT Expat License and developed in Ruby on Rails. It is available in two versions, namely the free-to-use Community Edition and a paid Enterprise Edition, with more features aimed at large businesses. The two flavors are on this page explained. The development team has released GitLab 11.4 and the release notes for this release can be found below.

GitLab 11.4 released with Merge Request Reviews and Feature Flags

We’re excited to announce the release of GitLab 11.4 with incredible updates to help teams work together more efficiently. Most teams adopting DevOps are focused on shortening cycle time, so improvements that reduce waste and extra work are welcome contributions toward faster delivery and better business results.

With GitLab 11.4 we’re making code reviews more efficient with Merge Request Reviews and a file tree for diffs. We are introducing Feature Flags in alpha. Auto DevOps and CI is more powerful with PostgreSQL migrations and timed incremental rollout. Even Git is faster with support for Git protocol v2.

Code review
Merge Request Reviews will reduce the noise from comments on code and merge requests. Batch Comments lets a reviewer enter multiple comments on the code or merge request and then finalize them in one batch. Now, the people subscribed to the project can more efficiently keep track of changes.

Having the right people review and approve code changes is a key step to delivering high-quality code. Building on Code Owners from the 11.3 release, GitLab can now suggest who should review and approve a specific merge request based on the CODEOWNERS file. This way, you can quickly and efficiently get changes reviewed and approved. This will also be useful when defining separation of duties and roles on a team, where you want to have defined reviewers for certain parts of the code.

The addition of the file tree view to the merge request makes it easier and faster for reviewers to navigate through multiple changed files and then provide their feedback.

Feature flags
We are introducing an Alpha version of Feature Flags, a feature toggle system. Teams can now practice Continuous Delivery by deploying new features to production in small batches, mitigating risk before a full rollout.

Auto DevOps and CI/CD
We’re also updating the ability for all users to take advantage of having Include files in their .gitlab-ci.yml files, moving it from Starter to Core. This will make it easier for all teams to leverage this best practice and more efficiently manage their CI/CD pipelines.

extra polish
Together with the wider GitLab community, there are many more wonderful improvements we have included in this release including a new profile layout, faster access to your profile status, highlighted @mentions, new quick actions, and the ability to close epics.

Key features released in GitLab 11.4

• Merge Request Reviews
• Create and toggle feature flags for your applications (alpha)
• File tree for browsing merge request diff
• Suggest Code Owners as merge request approvers
• New user profile page overview
• Set and show your status message within the user menu
• Move ability to use includes in .gitlab-ci.yml from Starter to Core
• Run jobs only/except for modifications on a path or file
• Add timed incremental rollouts to Auto DevOps
• Support Kubernetes RBAC for GitLab managed apps
• Auto DevOps support for RBAC
• Support PostgreSQL DB migration and initialization for Auto DevOps

Other improvements in GitLab 11.4

• List of subscribed labels
• Filter by WIP merge requests
• Highlight @mentions for yourself distinctly
• Click to insert Markdown table and link
• Include new issues created in Burndown Chart
• Expanded weight values ​​in issues API
• Lock discussion quick action
• close epics
• Improve Admin Area settings structure
• Explore projects by popularity
• Display code language percentage on project overview
• Download two factor recovery codes
• Filter admin Runners view by Runner type and state
• Add support for interactive web terminal to Docker executor
• Skip Auto DevOps jobs based on feature availability
• Allow pipelines to schedule delayed jobs
• Interactive runbooks with Nurtch and JupyterHub
• Add manual entries for License Management
• Alert thresholds now displayed on metrics dashboard
• Git protocol v2
• Geo UX improvements in Admin Area
• Prometheus 2.0 upgrade for Omnibus GitLab
• Geo improvements
• Geo improvements for SSH Git commands proxy to primary node
• Performance improvements
  Some of the more noteworthy performance improvements in GitLab 11.4 include:
  • Rendering Markdown with many label references is faster
  • Issue discussions with many cross-project commit references are faster
  • Fetching related branches for an issue runs fewer queries
  • Fetching environments for a merge request runs fewer queries
  • Computing recipients for notification emails runs fewer queries
  • Creating a new diff discussion on a merge request is faster
  • Fetching “Last commit” info in tree view makes fewer Gitaly calls
  • Loading merge request is faster after removing dead code
• Omnibus improvements
  • redis has been updated to 3.2.12, which is a critical security update that fixes multiple vulnerabilities. After upgrading to 11.4, run gitlab-ctl restart redis to ensure the new version is running.
  • GitLab 11.4 includes Mattermost 5.3, an open source Slack-alternative whose newest release includes enhanced search on desktop and mobile, plus much more. It includes security updates and upgrading is recommended.
  • git has been updated to 2.18.1, and libpng to 1.6.35.
  • gnupg has been updated to 2.2.10, gpgme to 1.10.0, libgcrypt to 1.8.3, npth to 1.6, libgpg-error to 1.32, and libassuan to 2.5.1.
  • Certificates in the trusted_certs directory are now set to 0644 permissions instead of 0755.