12.7

GitLab 12.7 Release

GitLab 12.7 released with Parent-Child Pipelines and Windows Shared Runners Beta

GitLab 12.7 released with Parent-Child Pipelines, Windows Shared Runners Beta, Pipeline Resource Groups, and much more!

GitLab 12.7 is now available with improvements to make your pipelines and teams more efficient and effective. Automation and pipelines are foundational for effective DevOps teams, and in 12.7 we’re delivering multiple improvements to make you faster and more efficient, including Parent-Child Pipelines, Pipeline Resource Groups, and Windows Shared Runners in beta on GitLab.com.

Because teams manage so much of their work in Merge Requests, Code Review Analytics and more informative Merge Request widgets will make it easier to optimize quality and cycle time.

Faster and More Efficient Pipelines and Teams

Large, complex pipelines can be both slow to execute and hard to understand. Parent-child pipelines will speed things up by allowing separate, child pipelines to run concurrently. By also separating and simplifying visualization and configuration per pipeline, and even allowing shared, reusable configuration, parent-child pipelines are easier to manage and will make both your CI/CD and your team more efficient.

Manage Shared Pipeline Resources

Many organizations have shared environments and resources where they want to prevent multiple changes from being made at the same time. Resource Groups help you limit pipeline concurrency to more efficiently and effectively manage jobs and resources.

Windows Shared Runners Beta

Windows developers can now choose to take advantage of Shared Runners on GitLab.com, instead of or in addition to setting up their own. This beta release enables running CI/CD jobs on Windows virtual machines with the added efficiency of a fully-managed, auto-scaling, and secure environment, managed by the GitLab.com team.

Faster Merge Request Management

Timely code review keeps your team shipping. Code Review Analytics will make it easy to find Merge Requests in review that need intervention, helping teams manage their cycle time. Improved Merge Request widgets now show when changes have made it to a specific environment, saving time tracking down the latest deploy.

And Much More

These are just a few highlights from the 45 new and improved features, and 12 performance improvements described below, and a small selection from the 1,593 merge requests made in 12.7. Check out more great updates below, such as automatically staging all changes in our Web IDE and the ability to share group access with another group.

Join us for an upcoming event Release survey

GitLab MVP badge

MVP This month's Most Valuable Person (MVP) is awarded to Fabio Huser

Fabio contributed several useful improvements in GitLab 12.7, including a button to delete pipelines, the option to disable issue auto-closing, a configurable template for merge request suggestion commits, dependency visualization when viewing a Rust Cargo.toml file, and an API endpoint for application appearance.

Thanks Fabio and the rest of the crew from Siemens!

12.7 Key improvements released in GitLab 12.7

Parent-Child Pipelines

Parent-Child Pipelines

Complex applications often require complex pipelines, which can become slow and hard to understand. As complexity in pipelines increases, visualizations grow unwieldy, configuration more convoluted, and execution slows down. When this happens, splitting complex pipelines into multiple pipelines, organized in a parent-children relationship, can improve performance and make pipelines easier to think about: performance can be improved because child pipelines can run concurrently, while configuration and visualization can be compartmentalized into different files or views.

In GitLab 12.7 you can now define these separate pipelines using separate YAML files. The .gitlab-ci.yml remains the primary entry point, but from there you can trigger any other YAML file in the repo as its own child pipeline with attribution back to the parent. We also support using includes to facilitate code reuse between these different pipelines. This can be really great for monorepos, for example, where the configuration for each component in the repository can be developed and stored separately, and all the child pipelines can run concurrently ⁠— even meeting back at the end for shared bundling and deployment.

Windows Shared Runners on GitLab.com Beta

Windows Shared Runners on GitLab.com Beta

We are happy to announce the availability of Windows Shared Runners hosted by GitLab, now in beta. You can take advantage of a fully-managed, auto-scaling, and secure environment for running your CI/CD jobs on Windows virtual machines, hosted on the same GCP infrastructure as GitLab.com. Windows Shared Runners are pre-configured with various software packages such as the Chocolately package manager for Windows, Visual Studio 2019 Build Tools, and Microsoft .Net Framework, to name a few.

As always, you can continue to install and manage Windows Runners on your own infrastructure, to use alongside or instead of the newly available GitLab.com Runners managed by the GitLab team.

For more information on pricing, limitations, and configuration, along with step-by-step instructions on how to get started, see the Windows Runners beta launch post.

Windows Shared Runners on GitLab.com Beta

Pipeline Resource Groups

Pipeline Resource Groups

Most often users want to parallelize their CI/CD as much as possible in order to speed up the total running time. However, there are some use cases when you may want to limit concurrency. For example, if you wanted to prevent a job from a different pipeline executing at the same time in the same environment. We see this often when physical hardware like a smart phone, computer chip, or embedded IoT device is used to run tests before releasing the software broadly. Trying to run tests from multiple pipelines, or even multiple jobs in the same pipeline, and at the same time can result in corrupted data, invalid test results, or even bricking the hardware.

Now, with Resource Groups you can limit pipeline concurrency to force jobs to execute sequentially, ensuring resources are only utilized as intended. Using the resource_group key in gitlab-ci.yml you can specify environments that are part of a Resource Group for each job that you want to constrain. When the job requests a Runner and the resource already has an existing job running, it will remain queued until the existing job has completed. You can even define multiple Resource Groups per job if, for example, you have multiple IoT devices that you test with and you want a test job to run on any one device in the group. Another great use case for this is when using Terraform for managing infrastructure as code, and you really want to be sure you’re only making one change to a given environment at a time. The ability to limit pipeline concurrency has been a highly requested feature and we are happy to make it available in this release. We look forward to hearing your feedback, enhancement requests, and success stories.

Code Review Analytics

Code Review Analytics

A recommended part of any software development process, code review enables peers and automated processes to check a proposed change to a repository.

It’s also where incoming changes can stall, because of a missed handoff, a key individual going on vacation, or a backlog of items to review. Cycle time depends on timely code review to keep your team shipping.

In order to help GitLab instances stay on top of this key part of the development process, we’re proud to introduce Code Review Analytics to highlight the status of merge requests in review.

Code Review Analytics starts the review process as soon as a merge request receives a non-author comment, and keeps track of how long a merge request has been open since. The highlighted merge requests in the table show review time in descending order, so it’s easy to find merge requests that might need intervention or breaking down further.

Code Review Analytics

Display the deployment time of a Merge Request

Display the deployment time of a Merge Request

The Merge Request widget now shows the environment name and the time of the deployment in every merge request. Previously, in order to determine when the last deploy took place, one would need to go through the list of commits and pipelines to get this information. By tracking merge requests, developers will be able to easily see when their changes made it into a certain environment.

Display the deployment time of a Merge Request

12.7 Other improvements in GitLab 12.7

Share group access with another group

Share group access with another group

Groups can be used for organizing projects and groups of people. A typical usage pattern is to create groups for different teams, e.g. Engineering, Legal, and Operations, and share relevant projects with each group.

For large instances with thousands of projects, sharing individual projects with a group quickly becomes unscalable. To make this easier, we’re introducing the ability to share a group with another group, removing the need to share individual project links with a group.

Share group access with another group

Filter Issues, Merge Requests, Epics, and Issue Boards using an ‘is not’ operator (!=)

Filter Issues, Merge Requests, Epics, and Issue Boards using an ‘is not’ operator (!=)

Finding precisely the issues, merge requests, and epics you want can be difficult, especially when you want to omit a subset of the results. GitLab now supports excluding results while filtering issues, merge requests, epics, and issues cards within an Issue Board using a not or an “is not” (!=) operator.

Browse previous file revisions from the Blame view

Browse previous file revisions from the Blame view

The Blame view allows you to trace the history of a file line by line, and inspect each commit. In GitLab 12.7, you can easily follow the history of a particular line, using the new button titled View blame prior to this change.

Thanks Hiroyuki Sato for your contribution!

Browse previous file revisions from the Blame view

Allow pip version to be configured in Dependency Scanning

Allow pip version to be configured in Dependency Scanning

With GitLab 12.7, you can now install a custom version of pip in Dependency Scanning by using the DS_PIP_VERSION variable. When this is set, it will be passed down to the Dependency Scanning analyzers.

Audit Events for Releases

Audit Events for Releases

As a step further into GitLab Releases, we make your journey through an audit easier by automatically including events for creating or editing Releases, downloading artifacts, and associating or dissociating a milestone from within GitLab’s audit logs.

Use CI/CD to update a Conan repository

Use CI/CD to update a Conan repository

We recently launched the GitLab Conan Repository to support C/C++ developers in publishing and downloading their dependencies. However, in order to leverage GitLab CI/CD, they were forced to use their user name and password, which is inefficient and a potential security risk.

In GitLab 12.7, we are excited to announce that users can now leverage the predefined environment variable, CI_JOB_TOKEN, to authenticate to their Conan Repository and easily publish and install their dependencies.

Disable user profile name changes

Disable user profile name changes

Administrators can now prevent users from changing their profile name to increase traceability of user actions. This additional control over identities will allow compliance-minded organizations the ability to ensure GitLab supports their internal policies for audit logging and identity verification.

This is an instance-level feature that requires administrative access and is currently available for self-managed customers only. You can follow and contribute to this issue discussing whether to enable this feature for GitLab.com users in a future release.

API for merge requests associated with a deployment

API for merge requests associated with a deployment

We have added support for an API that retrieves the list of merge requests shipped within a given deployment. This is useful for tracking when a merge request was merged to a certain environment.

Guide for Incremental Rollouts with GitLab CI/CD

Guide for Incremental Rollouts with GitLab CI/CD

When rolling out changes to your application, it is possible to release production changes to only a portion of your Kubernetes pods as a risk mitigation strategy. By releasing production changes gradually, error rates or performance degradation can be monitored, and if there are no problems, all pods can be updated. GitLab supports both manually triggered and timed rollouts to a Kubernetes production system using Incremental Rollouts, to support both Continuously Delivered and Continuously Deployed applications. They are already available in Auto DevOps projects. We have prepared a new guide that shows how to achieve the same result when using only GitLab CI/CD.

Toggle Feature Flags directly from the list

Toggle Feature Flags directly from the list

Feature Flags allow you to enable or disable a recently introduced feature in your production environment, to reduce the risk of breaking your application until the feature is fully tested. Now you can conveniently toggle flags on or off inside GitLab directly from the Feature Flag list. Previously, feature flags could only be toggled using the API.

Toggle Feature Flags directly from the list

Ignore Sentry errors from GitLab

Ignore Sentry errors from GitLab

Errors can be noisy and plentiful which makes triage processes time-consuming, because it is difficult to sort through the cruft to find the critical ones. Being able to ignore an error in the GitLab UI, gives you the ability to clear out errors that don’t need attention, so that you can easily focus on the ones that require fixing. Ignoring non-critical errors makes the error list easy to scan and triage. The Ignore button can be found on the specific detail page for the error and on the error list.

Configure default commit message for applied Suggestions

Configure default commit message for applied Suggestions

Suggesting changes in merge requests makes proposing improvements easy. However, if you use a push rule to require a specific format for all commit messages, in most cases it wasn’t possible to apply the suggested change, because the commit message generated by GitLab wouldn’t match the validation pattern for the push rule.

GitLab 12.7 now supports configuring a commit message template for the commits created by GitLab when applying a suggested change, so to that is valid according to your commit message push rule.

Thanks Fabio Huser and Siemens!

Configure default commit message for applied Suggestions

When browsing a project, looking at its dependencies is often useful, but dependencies are typically stored in machine-generated files that link to a public package registry.

Now, when viewing a Rust project’s Cargo.toml dependency file, GitLab will detect and link packages to crates.io, so that it is easier to understand its dependencies. Previously, in GitLab 9.3 support was added for Go, Ruby, Node.js, Python, PHP, and Objective-C.

Thanks Fabio Huser and Siemens!

Autolink Rust package names

Find SSH and deploy keys by MD5 and SHA-256 fingerprint

Find SSH and deploy keys by MD5 and SHA-256 fingerprint

With OpenSSH switching to SHA-256 by default in 2015, displaying a MD5 hash for SSH keys is not useful. Thanks to a community contribution, you’re now able to see the SHA-256 fingerprint for both SSH and deploy keys - and query for a user via the key’s fingerprint, thanks to the addition of this new API.

Thank you to Roger Meier (@bufferoverflow) for the contribution!

Duplicate metrics dashboards

Duplicate metrics dashboards

GitLab comes out-of-the-box with a number of useful metrics dashboards for monitoring your application’s health. In 12.7, you can now easily duplicate one of those default dashboards in order to make slight customizations to add, for example, your application’s specific system or business metrics.

Duplicate metrics dashboards

Require all users to log in to access GitLab Pages websites

Require all users to log in to access GitLab Pages websites

GitLab Pages now has a way to disable non-authorized access separate from project privacy settings, which will then require all users to log in prior to accessing the site even if the project is set to public. This setting can be enabled by a GitLab administrator via a checkbox in the Admin Settings for Pages.

Require all users to log in to access GitLab Pages websites

Surface language and urgency information on Sentry error detail page

Surface language and urgency information on Sentry error detail page

Triage of errors is challenging because they are noisy, and pertinent information is difficult to find. The error detail page in GitLab surfaces the most important attributes of an error. With GitLab 12.7, those details now include language and urgency, intended to help determine the root cause of the error as quickly as possible.

Support for Elasticsearch 7.x

Support for Elasticsearch 7.x

In GitLab 12.7 we’ve updated dependencies across our indexer and GitLab to support Elasticsearch 7.x alongside our existing support for Elasticsearch 6.x. This is the most requested feature for our Elasticsearch integration so we’re very excited to be including this in the release.

With the update to support Elasticsearch 7.x we’re also shipping version 2.0.0 of our indexer which officially provides this support. As previously mentioned, Elasticsearch 5.6.x is no longer supported for use with GitLab.

API route for all project services of a project

API route for all project services of a project

A new API route is available under /projects/:id/services that provides a list of all active project services for that given project. Previously, the GitLab API included routes that allowed for creating, editing, and deleting services–but no route to get this list.

The ability to get a list of active services makes it easier for developers to programmatically add and edit services on their projects from the API.

GitLab Chart improvements

GitLab Chart improvements

  • Documentation was added to provide instructions for connecting GitLab to an external Minio instance for object storage.
  • The GitLab chart no longer manages the life cycle of the GitLab operator CRD (Kubernetes Custom Resource Definition). Installation of the CRD now can be done directly with kubectl. For new instructions on installing CRD, see the GitLab Operator installation docs.
  • The flag to disable gitaly has been moved to a global setting. This simplifies the process for disabling Gitaly so that you no longer need to edit multiple settings across the various services. For new instructions on how to disable Gitaly to leverage an external Gitaly service, see Configure this chart with External Gitaly.

GitLab Runner 12.7

GitLab Runner 12.7

We’re also releasing GitLab Runner 12.7 today! GitLab Runner is the open source project that is used to run your CI/CD jobs and send the results back to GitLab.

Changes include:

The list of all changes can be found in GitLab Runner’s CHANGELOG.

Parse and analyze instance activity with structured application logging

Parse and analyze instance activity with structured application logging

GitLab’s log system allows administrators to monitor and evaluate log files to better understand the state of an instance. These logs have a wide variety of use cases, including performance monitoring, analytics, and system auditing.

Some logs, however, are only offered in an unstructured format — making them challenging to parse. One of these unstructured logs was application.log, which recorded application activity including project, group, and user events. In 12.7, we’ve introduced a more flexible logging system in GitLab, and introduced a JSON-formatted version of application.log in the form of application_json.log.

Creating a structured version of this logfile opens up a number of interesting use cases, like ingesting into a monitoring tool for event auditing, sending these events to a visualization tool to build customized dashboards, and many more.

Create an issue directly from an epic

Create an issue directly from an epic

No more switching through multiple tabs to create an issue and assign it to an epic! You can now create an issue directly from the Epic view.

Create an issue directly from an epic

Cut and paste a Markdown table from a spreadsheet

Cut and paste a Markdown table from a spreadsheet

Incorporating tabular data into Markdown can be a tedious and labor intensive process. As of 12.7, you can now copy content from a spreadsheet and paste it directly into a Markdown editor within GitLab. Automatically converting the spreadsheet into valid Markdown syntax let’s you spend less time formatting and more time creating amazing things.

Automatically stage all changes in Web IDE

Automatically stage all changes in Web IDE

The Web IDE in GitLab is a great tool for contributing changes to a project. However, the lack of a persistent file system can become a challenge. Situations may occur where users make changes to multiple files, but not all changes are staged and committed prior to browsing away from the Web IDE page. This could result in the loss of those changes.

In order to make the Web IDE more accessible to users and prevent more cases of accidental loss, changes in the Web IDE will now be automatically staged. When a user clicks Commit, the following commit screen will give them the ability to add their commit message and select their branch instead of giving the option to stage changes.

Delete a pipeline from the UI

Delete a pipeline from the UI

Previously, deleting a pipeline was only possible from the API. As of 12.7 users with owner permissions to a project can click on the new Delete button to delete a specific pipeline directly from the Pipeline Details page. This non-reversible action expires the pipeline caches and deletes all related objects (builds, logs, artifacts, and triggers).

A key benefit of being able to delete a pipeline from the UI is the ability to take immediate actions to protect leaked secrets if a job in the pipeline exposes private keys in plain text. And an even more commom use case for deleting pipelines is the need to clean-up a messy CI history littered with failed pipelines resulting from CI configuration attempts or experiments; a side benefit of cleanup being assurance that undesirable pipelines are not inadvertently used again.

Zoom in on your Designs when viewing them

Zoom in on your Designs when viewing them

When uploading a large image, like a widescreen website layout, to the Designs tab in an issue, there was difficulty in seeing the detail of the image because it was displayed in the fixed-width viewport. We now include the ability to zoom in on the Design so you can get into the details! You’ll find the zoom controls at the bottom of the image.

Auto DevOps does not run unless Dockerfile or matching buildpack exists

Auto DevOps does not run unless Dockerfile or matching buildpack exists

Auto DevOps is a great way to get started with modern DevOps practices for any project. However, until now, Auto DevOps needed to run a CI pipeline to determine compatibility with a project by checking if an existing Dockerfile or a matching buildpack exists for the project.

In an effort to make it more efficient and taking advantage of the new workflow:rules feature in GitLab CI, Auto DevOps will only run if the project contains a Dockerfile or if a matching buildpack exists for the project’s language.

Install Kubernetes applications using CI templates

Install Kubernetes applications using CI templates

Installing Kubernetes applications using GitLab CI provides a great way to customize Helm charts and custom resources (CRDs) prior to installation. As part of this release we have added templates for installing Cert-Manager as well as GitLab Runner using GitLab CI. Installing the GitLab Runner helm chart via GitLab CI allows users to configure settings they previously could not, such as number of concurrent jobs or the jobs check interval.

Install Kubernetes applications using CI templates

Create templates for email responses from the Service Desk

Create templates for email responses from the Service Desk

Service Desk email responses can now be customized per your organization! Simply add template Markdown files to your repository and when the Service Desk responds to a user, the templates are used! This will allow custom branding and messaging to provide an optimal experience for customers.

Geo supports replicating Design Management assets

Geo supports replicating Design Management assets

GitLab Design Management allows users to upload design assets (e.g. mockups) to GitLab issues and store them in one place.

GitLab Geo now supports replicating these Design Management assets to secondary nodes, ensuring that distributed teams can access them from the closest Geo node. Because Design Management assets are replicated, they can also be restored from a secondary node.

We currently don’t support verification of these assets and will add support in a future release.

Append user template to incoming Service Desk issues

Append user template to incoming Service Desk issues

The Service Desk allows new issues to be created by sending an email to a unique address. When these new Service Desk issues are created, it would be beneficial if they could be automatically assigned to a specific user, given a label or assigned to a milestone. You can now do that by creating a template to be included with all new Service Desk issues. Include any of the quick actions in the template and they will activate when the issue is created.

Appearance API

Appearance API

You’re now able to adjust appearance settings of your instance - including attributes like your instance’s title, description, favicon, logo, and others - through a new API.

Thank you to Fabio Huser and Siemens for the contribution!

Digging through a stack trace is cumbersome enough without also having to determine what version impacted the affected file. In GitLab 12.7, the commit that most likely caused the error is automatically surfaced on the error detail page. Being able to automatically associate the commit with the suspect error you are seeing can significantly reduce the time to resolve the error. This gives you the ability to immediately roll back the change, or fix it with a patch.

Please note that in order to take advantage of this feature, you will need to name your Sentry Release objects with the SHA of the deployed commit.

Improved diff highlighting for Merge Request Suggestions

Improved diff highlighting for Merge Request Suggestions

Proposing improvements to a Merge Request using a Suggested Change makes collaborating easier by applying the change and resolving the discussion with a single click.

In GitLab 12.7, improved diff highlighting of suggested changes makes it obvious which words and characters have changed, so that you can apply the suggestion with confidence.

Improved diff highlighting for Merge Request Suggestions

Disable automatic closing of Issues from Merge Requests

Disable automatic closing of Issues from Merge Requests

Every team has unique needs. Oftentimes, it’s necessary to keep an Issue open beyond the life-cycle of a single Merge Request or to reference an Issue in a commit without the intent of closing the Issue.

Prior to this release, teams did not have a way to disable the default behavior of automatically closing an Issue by mentioning it in a Merge Request or commit. As a step towards providing teams with more granular control over this functionality, you can now disable automatic closing of Issues within your Project’s settings.

Thanks Fabio Huser and the Siemens crew!

Resolve Sentry errors in GitLab

Resolve Sentry errors in GitLab

Once you’ve identified the root cause of an error, deployed the fix, and verified its success (all from within GitLab). With GitLab 12.7, it is now possible to resolve the error without switching to Sentry, just with a click of a button. The Resolve button can be found on the specific detail page for the error.

Improved initial response time of /projects API endpoint

Improved initial response time of /projects API endpoint

In GitLab 12.7, we have made stark improvements to the first page response time of the /projects API. Previously, for some parameter combinations, we were seeing response times as high as 30 seconds on GitLab.com. With these changes, the majority of responses will be within one second. Note that these improvements apply regardless of the pagination strategy used.

Improved initial response time of /projects API endpoint

Faster /projects API endpoint with keyset pagination

Faster /projects API endpoint with keyset pagination

We have introduced a new paginaton mechanism for the /projects API endpoint. Previously, offset-based pagination was the only method available, which while providing flexible sorting and filtering options, performs increasingly poorly for each page requested. This poor performance characteristic put increasing loads on the GitLab server, and also exhibited longer and longer response times.

With GitLab 12.7, we are introducing keyset-based pagination. While this method only allows for sorting based on project id, it performs significantly faster with consistently low response times regardless of which page you are requesting. Utilization of keyset pagination for queries which retrieve many pages, will both reduce the load on the GitLab server and result in faster data retrieval.

In 13.0, we will implement a configurable page depth limit for offset-based pagination, defaulting to a maximum depth of 50,000 records. This limit of 50,000 will be enforced on GitLab.com in 13.0.

Faster /projects API endpoint with keyset pagination

Allow CI to be skipped on rebase when using API

Allow CI to be skipped on rebase when using API

It was already possible to skip the creation of a CI pipeline when using ci skip (or skip ci) in your commit message or by using push options, but it was not possible to skip CI when rebasing. As of 12.7 it is now possible to do so when using the rebase API.

GitLab Chart 3.0 released

GitLab Chart 3.0 released

GitLab Chart 3.0, released along with GitLab 12.7, is a new major version of the GitLab Helm chart. Due to the significant changes in this version, upgrading requires additional steps to be performed and should be done in accordance with the upgrade documentation. GitLab Chart 3.0 includes functional improvements and updates to a number of components, each of which are outlined below and linked to the GitLab Chart 3.0 epic.

  • The GitLab Chart uses a fork of the nginx-ingress chart. GitLab Chart 3.0 pulls in changes that were made in the upstream nginx-ingress chart to ensure GitLab compatibility with Helm 2.15.0 and Helm 3.
  • The extensions/* and apps/beta* API versions stopped being supported in Kubernetes 1.16. Multiple upstream charts used by GitLab have been updated to stop using these API versions. GitLab chart 3.0 includes updated upstream charts: Prometheus chart 9.4.x, PostgreSQL chart 7.7.0, and Redis chart 10.3.x (no longer forked).
  • Sidekiq deployments now use unique selectors to avoid confusion over which deployments own a set of sidekiq pods when multiple deployments are created. For important information about upgrading Sidekiq deployments, refer to the upgrade documentation.

Omnibus improvements

Omnibus improvements

  • The version of Redis bundled in Omnibus GitLab has been updated from Redis 3.2.12 to Redis 5.0.7, which brings GitLab up to date with the latest stable release of Redis. Redis 5 includes a number of improvements. For more information on the changes made in Redis 5, see the Redis release announcement. A manual restart of Redis is required after upgrading. See the upgrade notes for instructions, and additional details for Redis HA.
  • Upgrades between certain versions can sometimes fail if background migrations are still running when the upgrade is attempted. Documentation has been added to Updating GitLab that explains how to check whether background migrations are still running.
  • The Ruby version included in GitLab has been updated from 2.6.3 to 2.6.5 to include some fixes and security patches.
  • Documentation was added on how to use the EXTERNAL_URL environment variable to make it easier to get a GitLab instance up and running.

Deprecations Deprecations

Planned removal of PostgreSQL 9.6 and 10.x in GitLab 13.0

Planned removal of PostgreSQL 9.6 and 10.x in GitLab 13.0

To take advantage of improved performance and functionality in PostgreSQL 11 such as partitioning, we plan to require PostgreSQL versions 11 and 12 in GitLab 13.x. To accomplish this, we will be introducing support for PostgreSQL 11 in an upcoming release of GitLab 12.x while maintaining support for 9.6 and 10.x. With the arrival of GitLab 13.0, PostgreSQL 11 will be required.

By minimally requiring PostgreSQL 11, we are able to leverage the new features introduced, without the overhead of maintaining multiple code paths. Going forward, we will be maintaining a yearly cadence of PostgreSQL upgrades, with support for the second and third most recent versions as soon as we are able to add them. We welcome your feedback on the proposed removals. Please comment in the Move to PG 11 and 12 epic.

Planned removal date: May 22, 2020

Offset pagination limit of 50,000 for /projects endpoint

Offset pagination limit of 50,000 for /projects endpoint

An offset-based pagination limit of 50,000 will be applied on GitLab.com, and by default on self-managed instances, to the /projects API endpoint in GitLab 13.0. Integrations which make API calls with offsets above 50,000 will need to switch to a keyset-based pagination method, which will offer significantly improved response times and reduced load on the GitLab server. Self-managed instances will be able to customize the limit to a desired value.

To provide the optimized performance, keyset-based pagination only offers ordering based on project id. Use cases which require more flexible ordering options can continue to use offset-based pagination, provided the offsets remain below the limit. If use cases require flexible ordering options with deep offsets, we recommend sorting client-side.

Planned removal date: May 22, 2020

Removals and breaking changes Removals and breaking changes

The complete list of all removed features can be viewed in the GitLab documentation. To be notified of upcoming breaking changes, subscribe to our Breaking Changes RSS feed.

Important notes on upgrading to GitLab Important notes on upgrading to GitLab 12.7

The Redis version packaged with Omnibus GitLab has been updated to Redis 5.0.7. When upgrading your instance of GitLab, you will need to restart Redis after the upgrade so that the new version will be active. To restart Redis, run sudo gitlab-ctl restart redis. If your instance has Redis HA using Sentinel, you will need to follow specific upgrade steps that are documented in Updating GitLab installed with the Omnibus GitLab package to avoid downtime.

GitLab 12.7 works towards implementing a more performant diff view. As part of this work, we have changed how diffs are stored in the Redis cache. Users upgrading their GitLab installation may see a temporary increase in Gitaly load as the cache begins receiving traffic. If this severely impacts availability, please disable the hset_redis_diff_caching feature flag.

This release of GitLab maps to a major release of the GitLab Chart, GitLab Chart 3.0. If you have installed GitLab using the Helm Chart, you will need to take some manual steps to upgrade from a previous version to GitLab Chart 3.0. For step-by-step instructions, refer to the upgrade documentation.

Helm 2.15.x contains bugs that affect the use of the GitLab helm chart. Do not use Helm 2.15.x with GitLab Chart. For supported versions of Helm, refer to the install documentation.


Changelog Changelog

Please check out the changelog to see all the named changes:

Installing Installing

If you are setting up a new GitLab installation please see the download GitLab page.

Updating Updating

Check out our update page.

Questions? Questions?

We'd love to hear your thoughts! Visit the GitLab Forum and let us know if you have questions about the release.

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