It is great but due to the update situation and the resources it needs (amount of RAM), I think it targets mainly groups and not individuals.
Give me a lightweight, one command, free software alternative with 60% of GitLab's feature set and I will be a happy man.
I agree that it is absolutely meant for groups more than individuals. We use GitLab like crazy in the office, but we also have GitHub accounts for community contributions and BitBucket accounts for private/personal stuff.
Edit: see their 6.0 to 6.1 release notes for more: https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/master/doc/update/...
For example at first we had to install gitolite as well and update it. Then we switched to gitlab-shell, so we had to make the switch and now update this as well. There was resque and then there was sidekiq. There was unicorn and then it was replaced by puma and now it is replaced once again by unicorn. At some point those of us who used sqlite could not migrate to mysql when sqlite was dropped. Also more than once, when I was quick to update I ran into problems and had to spend hours in search of a solution. Nowadays I update near the end of the release cycle to avoid such issues. I am on gentoo, so I have to create and adjust my own init scripts. I use apache, so I have to figure that out as well.
All these I guess can take anywhere from 10-24 hours per year, which can't be justified for one person. For a team it is ok.
As for gitbucket, I gave it a try and it only supports git access through http and even there it can't give read only acces to private repos. Any account that has read access, has also write access to a private repo, which makes it useless for deployment.
GitLab co-founder here. Thanks for commenting and informing people.
For those interested a bit of background. Replacing gitolite with gitlab-shell in GitLab 5.0 was a painful step that we did not take lightly. It enabled GitLab to perform much better (100x faster on some operations) in larger installations (1000+ repo's). It also greatly reduced the moving parts and installation problems people experienced.
We tested Puma on GitLab cloud for weeks to see if there where issues but after the switch we ran into big problems so we had to go back to unicorn. The other transitions have similar stories. We try to be careful but we want to end up with a great solution so sometimes we have to make hard choices.
I'm sorry we don't have the resourced to provide official support for Gentoo, everything we have is in the user contributed gitlab-recipes https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlab-recipes/tree/master/insta...
Eventually I installed myself. Everything works great now, although I had a couple of hiccups when trying to upgrade to a beta (that'll teach me).
The drop-in-and-run WAR stuff is the greatest thing ever (I'm using Gitblit).
It is, but it costs more than many small teams can afford.
I especially like its Pull Request interface. It separates out the changes into a file tree, which appears as a pane on the left. Makes it much easier to review large PRs.
The only hitch is, Atlassian has very opinionated product managers. I (and a bunch of other users) had to convince them to support "forks" over a long JIRA thread!
?? Their source code is downloadable to us since we have a license, but I've not checked. Everything else Atlassian purchased has been Java, afaik.
And Atlassian's only opinionated project manager I know about is Jens who does Stash, so I think you are generalizing to apply that to all of Atlassian. I've been using their products a long time now and he is the first that has been like that, but I know what you mean. He doesn't really meet up with Atlassian's typical level of customer service because of his attitude, but maybe he's a "rockstar" that deserves respect.
The core of Stash is actually written in JAVA, with only few plugins being implemented in Scala. But that number will likely grow going forward.
You are probably right that some of us are slightly opinionated. But as was pointed out before, I believe product managers should be opinionated as long as the opinions are formed by knowing your customers and market extremely well.
I'd say that's a good thing. A product can't be all things to all people and when it tries it ends up as a big hogde-podge of compromises that make no-one happy (either that, or being a beast to configure, thus making support painful).
Now, I don't know what the particular issue over forks are (related to branches?) and whether it's reasonable, but the fact that they were eventually convincible only makes it seem better.
Another example of a crazy bug/feature in JIRA: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/84349/rapid-board-ti...
Nope, it's all Java. It uses the same stack as our other products.
It shares the standard Atlassian plugin framework, which allows users to write plugins in Scala, but the product itself is all Java.
I use Bitbucket for my repo's (with mirrors on my servers) as I actually prefer it (and you can have unlimited repo's < 5 users) so it was a pain to have a dependency on github as well.
Single points of failure suck.
(edited link)
Can't you just add a new remote, push and bang, your code is now there? You should always have a full (hopefully up to date) source somewhere so incase github/bitbucket/remote provider - even your server if you host locally on gitlab etc - catches on fire you always have a spare.