About the Book

Why another GitLab book

I have been following the GitLab community since its very beginning in early 2012. GitLab provides comprehensive documentation, but some things cannot be put in the docs.

During my involvement in helping the community answering questions, I found out that there is a piece missing from GitLab to completely bond with its users. Thus, I decided to write down all the missing concepts that would ultimately form guides with examples rather than plain docs.

Rest assured that if I find that a piece that also belongs to the documentation I will submit an MR to GitLab.

Audience

The book mainly targets at system administrators. Simple concepts are left out since they are already documented by GitLab upstream. Here is a short list of what I will talk about in this book. For more information look at the chapter list.

• Learn to use and properly configure GitLab, according to your setup.
• Install and deploy to most known cloud providers.
• Tie GitLab with your existing database, be it PostgreSQL, MySQL or MariaDB.
• Acquire strong troubleshooting skills when things don't go as you expect it.
• Work with the API and automate ordinary tasks.
• Squeeze the power of web/system/custom hooks.
• Enable and use effectively different authentication methods like LDAP.
• Learn how to build your own omnibus packages.

Publisher, license and price

Since GitLab is under super active development, publishing on Leanpub gives me the opportunity to edit whenever I please to do so, which means no out-dated chapters. I can also use my favorite tools: vim, git and markdown which means greater productivity.

Buy once and get free updates for life!

I'm strongly thinking of publishing a free html version of the book under an open source license when it gets finished, but till then there is a minimum price for the e-book. This is to get me going with testing GitLab configuration and installation to services that cost money and be able to dedicate a significant amount of my time into writing.

Errata and requests

Report any errata or requests to the issue tracker created specifically for this book.

About the Author

Achilleas Pipinellis

@_axil

Hi! I am Achilleas Pipinellis, an open source enthusiast who tries to get involved in as many projects as possible. I am a member of the GitLab core team, a Fedora packager, a Mozillian,  an Archlinux user and an article author at DigitalOcean. I love writing tutorials and exploring new technologies.