My move to Gitlab was basically "come for the free repos, stay for the rest of the amazing features". I will not be moving off it, and my new repos will keep being on Gitlab.
Thats why Github won't want people testing GitLab because feature wise Gitlab is a much better product and is getting better at a faster rate than github
The integrated CI is amazing, the Docker registry is nice, the issue boards are great, the saner permission model (you can add multiple people as repository owners without putting them in a team), these are the things I can recall off the top of my head.
Being able to have groups and organizations without the weirdness of GitHub.
GitHub's default path for organizations is that you are creating a business that will be very separate from your personal account.
GitLab's default path is that it's just a group. Maybe just a named group for related projects. Once you dig in though, GitLab's group admin is much better than GitHub in my opinion.
Anyone who has ever done development on any Microsoft site has felt the pain of a million logins.
I was working on Outlook stuff at my previous job and it was a nightmare. They have three different offerings of emails. You can login in Outlook and O365 with the same account iirc, but not the others. Or something like that.
I just remember wanting to cry as I tried to figure out how to login.
Then the API docs are even worse. They had different APIs for each email offering and one pointed to the other then that one pointed to the previous one.
Microsoft's problem is that it has too many services. Google may change things constantly but at least they don't have three different email offerings with three different APIs at varying levels of brokeness.
I actually switched back to GitHub yesterday, because it‘s still better integrated in the overal tool landscape (eg Heroku). So I just pulled the trigger on a $7 subscription for private repos. And today the good news of free private repos arrived :)
I'm sorry to hear you left GitLab. We're working on making sure GitLab offers a great PaaS experience https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/111 (I posted in there 3 days ago, hopefully indicating this is important to us)
This is great news. I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with.
I'm not sure how relevant it is to you, but I hope you take some inspiration from https://platform.sh/ – it's the PaaS I've had the most luck with. While it isn't perfect, it's the closest thing I've found so far. Their "almost everything is in git" and instant environment cloning are fantastic features.
My understanding is that everything is cloned – included Redis and any search indexes. I've only tried with a database though, so that's the only thing I'm certain that works.
co-founder here, a bit late. Yes everything gets cloned. Databases, search-engines, message-queues, static files... you get precisely the same cluster in the same state.
No need to be sorry, I'm still bought into GitLab. I use it extensively at work and it's fantastic. But with my private projects, I don't have the capacity to deal with Kubernetes' complexity (even when it's well integrated), I really just want my stuff to be fully managed and GitLab isn't there, yet. I'll keep an eye out.
