List of subscribed labels
Labels in GitLab are very powerful since they can be applied to issues,
merge requests, and epics. As you use more labels, it can be difficult to
maintain them.
In a recent previous release, we added the ability to search by labels on
the project labels list page. With this release, you can now search by labels,
sort by name/created at/updated at, and even see a list of labels you have
subscribed to. This is available both in group and project labels list pages.
Highlight @mentions for yourself distinctly
When collaborating in a long discussion in an issue or merge request, often
many users are involved, making it difficult to quickly at a glance, see
comments that are directed at you.
With this release, @mentions for yourself (i.e. the current user), are highlighted
in a different color, allowing you to easily see which comments involve you,
helping you focus on them quickly.
Include new issues created in Burndown Chart
Burndown Charts help teams track work, as it progresses throughout a milestone.
Usually, the scope of work is decided and agreed on before the milestone
begins. But occasionally, there will be important exceptions to the rule,
(such as an emergency bug or security fix) and new scope needs to be included,
in the form of new issues.
With this release, burndown charts now accounts for these
new issues that are created in the middle of a milestone, resulting in an
uptick of its line.
Lock discussion quick action
Locking discussions in issues and merge requests is helpful to direct conversations
to newer issues (or merge requests). It can also be used to control abusive
or otherwise unproductive behavior.
With this release, we now have quick actions to lock and unlock discussions,
making it easier to type a comment and lock/unlock all one action.
Thank you Mehdi Lahmam for the contribution!
Improve Admin Area settings structure
Depending on your responsibilities, administrating GitLab can provide
a very complex challenge due to all things GitLab offers.
With this release, we improve the experience of our Admin Area Settings by
moving all sections into new, individual Settings sub-pages. This provides
admins a time-saving shortcut to access any detail to manage.
Display code language percentage on project overview
We recently introduced a new code language bar on the Project overview page,
providing a quick overview about programming languages involved.
With GitLab 11.4, we introduce an additional absolute measure by showing
a new percentage value for each relevant code language shown. This provides
a more quantitative view of your project’s technology stack.
Thank you for this contribution, Johann Hubert Sonntagbauer!
Filter admin Runners view by Runner type and state
The admin runner view now supports the ability to filter
by runner type and state, giving you more options to manage
especially large fleets of runners in your environment.
Skip Auto DevOps jobs based on feature availability
Starting in 11.4 Auto DevOps will now evaluate the plan (GitLab.com) or tier (self-managed)
for the instance in which it’s running in order to determine which jobs to skip. This will
result in faster Auto DevOps pipeline when certain features are not in use.
This will not only save you time but will also result in a cleaner view of Auto DevOps pipeline,
showing you only the relevant jobs for your project.
Interactive runbooks with Nurtch and JupyterHub
Interactive runbooks provide a powerful way for operators to interact with various systems to carry out
common tasks such as diagnosing, deploying, and measuring infrastructure components.
The JupyterHub app offered via GitLab’s Kubernetes integration now ships with Nurtch’s
Rubix library, providing a simple way to create DevOps
runbooks. A sample runbook is provided, showcasing common operations.
Alert thresholds now displayed on metrics dashboard
With GitLab 11.4, configured alert thresholds are now displayed directly on the metrics charts.
This allows easier determination of which metrics are currently generating alerts, and better
visualization of the interplay of the metric and alert threshold.
Geo UX improvements in Admin Area
As a Geo admin, keeping an overview of your secondary nodes setup and the synchronization
state is crucial when working with distributed teams.
With GitLab 11.4, we improve the Geo-related Admin Area settings by improving and showing even
more synchronization and verification details in the user interface. On your primary node, a
new button “Open projects” adds a new quick link to navigate to the “Projects” list of the
corresponding secondary node.
On secondary nodes, a new “All” tab gives you a quick overview about the verification state
of all projects.
Further UX improvements are in our pipeline!
Geo improvements
We continually focus on improving our Geo feature for distributed teams. Some of the additional noteworthy improvements in GitLab 11.4 include:
Read our fresh blog post on how we built GitLab Geo.
GitLab Runner 11.4
We’re also releasing GitLab Runner 11.4 today! GitLab Runner is the open source project
that is used to run your CI/CD jobs and send the results back to GitLab.
Most interesting changes:
List of all changes can be found in GitLab Runner’s CHANGELOG.
Performance improvements
Some of the more noteworthy performance improvements in GitLab 11.4 include:
Filter by WIP merge requests
Merge requests are a core part of GitLab, allowing team members to collaborate
on code transparently. In particular, we encourage teams to share their
work early, and use the WIP (work in progress) feature to indicate that
a merge request is still undergoing active work and should not be merged
yet.
With this release, we’re making it easier for users to differentiate
between WIP and non-WIP merge requests by having a dedicated filter in
both group-level and project-level merge requests lists. This allows users
to quickly focus in on merge requests that are still in their early stages
of work, versus those that are toward the final stages of review before
merge.
Click to insert Markdown table and link
GitLab supports GitLab Flavored Markdown (GFM) in most places throughout
GitLab where you enter text, providing the power of rich formatting with
a simple syntax. In particular, you can create tables in GFM. Previously,
this was painful to use, especially for large tables, since you had to type
a lot of characters or paste in a previous table just to format it the way
you want. Similarly, GFM also supports URL links. But sometimes you may
forget the particular syntax.
With this release, you can now click on the table button in the GFM editor,
and this will automatically insert a table for you. You can then easily
enter table values or extend the table, formatting it just the way you want.
You can use this in description and comment boxes all throughout GitLab.
You can now also click on the link button, and this will generate the URL
link syntax skeleton for you. Allowing you to quickly paste in a link and
write the name of it.
Thank you George Tsiolis for the table contribution!
Thank you Jan Beckmann for the URL link contribution!
Expanded weight values in issues API
In a previous release, we expanded the allowable values of issue weight
from a small number to effectively unlimited, any number greater than zero.
With this release, we’ve brought this flexibility to the issues API as well,
allowing users to set this field with the newly expanded number range with
the API.
Close epics
Similar to issues and merge requests, you can now close (and re-open) epics
in GitLab. The epics list now has the Open, Closed, and All tabs, just like
issues. So when you have completed all the work in an epic, or it is no
longer relevant, you can close it, and it won’t appear anymore in the default
list view.
You can close (and re-open) an epic via buttons on the epic, via quick actions
in an epic comment, and also via the API, exactly like issues.
Explore projects by popularity
At GitLab, we do our best to enable you to explore relevant and cool projects
on your GitLab instance.
With this release, a new filter “Most stars” provides an incredible useful
filter to show projects most starred on your instance.
Thank you for this contribution, Jacopo Beschi!
Download two-factor recovery codes
Two-factor authentication is a de facto standard for signing up for any relevant web-based
application. At GitLab we understand and take this seriously. Whenever you set up a two-factor
authentication initially, we provide limited recovery codes that allow you to regain access
to your account as a fallback.
With this release, we now support download of recovery codes as a text
file using the new “Download codes” button.
Thank you for this contribution, Luke Picciau!
Add support for interactive web terminal to Docker executor
The interactive web terminals feature has been expanded to be
compatible with Docker executors as well. For now, the Docker session
is closed as soon as the script exits, but we are aiming to further
improve this behavior by resolving #3605 in
our next release.
Allow pipelines to schedule delayed jobs
It is now possible to set a job to start after a delay
via the when keyword in .gitlab-ci.yml. The timer starts
ticking when the job would have otherwise started, giving you
control to implement tasks that need to wait for a period of time to occur - for
example, when implementing timed incremental rollouts, or any
other delays needed after performing some other action.
Add manual entries for License Management
License Management policy allows developers to define if they want to approve or blacklist
a specific license for their project. This can be done as soon as a new license is introduced,
directly in the merge request page. But sometimes project maintainers want to populate the
list beforehand, so that developers already know if their changes are aligned with the policy.
In GitLab 11.4, we introduce the ability to add manual entries for License Management. Project
maintainers can prefill the policy in the Settings > CI/CD > License Management page by
choosing from a set of common licenses, or add a custom entry to that list.
Git protocol v2
Developers fetch refs many times a day to check if the current branch
is behind the remote branch. Git protocol v2 is a major update to Git’s
wire protocol
which defines how clones, fetches, and pushes are communicated between
the client (your computer) and the server (GitLab). The new wire
protocol improves the performance of fetch commands and enables future
protocol improvements.
Previously, all responses to fetch commands included a list of all
references in the repository. For example, fetching updates for a
single branch (e.g. git fetch origin master) would also retrieve a
complete list of all references. In the case of large projects, this
could be over 100,000 refs and 10s of megabytes of data.
Git protocol v2 is supported from Git v2.18.0 and is opt-in. To enable
globally run git config --global protocol.version 2. Git protocol v2
over SSH is not yet enabled on GitLab.com and must be enabled manually
for self-managed installations.
Prometheus 2.0 upgrade for Omnibus GitLab
Omnibus GitLab comes out of the box with Prometheus, allowing easy observability of deployed instances.
The Prometheus team has released a major new version, the 2.x series, which offers a
number of improvements.
These include improved performance and a more efficient time-series database format. Unfortunately
because of the architectural changes to the database, it is not backwards compatible with the old 1.x format.
With GitLab 11.4, Prometheus 2.4.2 is now available in the Omnibus package so users can take advantage of its benefits.
- New installations of 11.4 and above will start with Prometheus 2.
- Existing installations will not be automatically upgraded. We have added a new command,
gitlab-ctl prometheus-upgrade, which can
be utilized to upgrade Prometheus and optionally migrate data. Prometheus will be stopped during data migration.
- GitLab 12.0 will automatically upgrade to Prometheus 2.0. With the automatic upgrade, Prometheus 1.0 data will not be migrated.
For more information on upgrading Prometheus to 2.4.2, please review our update documentation.
Geo improvements for SSH Git commands proxy to primary node
Making Geo as easy to use as possible is one of our constant goals to support widely distributed
teams using GitLab. In 11.3
we added initial support for proxying SSH git push from secondary nodes to primary nodes.
With this release, we further improve the performance and usability of this feature, allowing
to clone and push to projects in a Geo scenario without having to maintain multiple configurations or update the remote URL manually.
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 sudo 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.
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