GitLab 10.4 released with Dynamic Application Security Testing and Web IDE (beta)

Reordering Issues in Epics

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Epics allow you to manage a list of associated issues that together share a theme. Often an epic represents a large feature that has been separated into multiple issues to be worked on across multiple milestones.

Depending on an organization’s workflow, they may want the list order in epics to reflect different scenarios. This could be priority, difficulty, feasibility, or order of implementation.

Some organizations might want to put closed issues near the top, while others might want them near the bottom. With this release, users can now reorder the issues in an epic by simply dragging and dropping, similar to that in Issue Boards.

Read through the documentation on Epics

Group Issue Boards API

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Similar to Project Issue Boards, you can now manage Group Issue Boards through the API, starting in this release, providing further flexibility and opportunities for automation in managing your individual team workflows.

For example, some teams have certain custom business requirements to move issues automatically between board columns under certain conditions. This is now possible for group issue boards through the API.

Read through the documentation on Group Issue Boards API

Fast SSH key lookup in CE

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When authorizing a user, OpenSSH uses linear search to find a key. This means that SSH operations become slower as the number of users on a GitLab instance grows. For large instances significant time and disk I/O may be required to fulfill a request, making Git over SSH slow.

In GitLab 9.3 fast SSH key lookup was added to GitLab EE. This authorizes SSH users via a fast, indexed lookup in the GitLab database instead of the default slow linear search. GitLab CE is designed for small teams, and as a result did not previously include this optimization. However, in support of GitLab’s Cloud Native Helm Charts, all parts of the code base will need to support fast SSH key lookup and has thus been added to GitLab CE.

Read through the documentation on fast SSH key lookup

GitLab Geo support for HA now Generally Available

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In GitLab 10.2 both Geo and Postgres HA individually reached general availability (GA), but the use of Geo in combination with HA was considered Beta.

Configurations using GitLab Geo in combination with HA are now considered GA. This allows geographically distributed teams to enjoy faster Git fetch operations using GitLab Geo and the increased redundancy of highly available configurations

Read through the documentation on GitLab Geo and High Availability

Improved environment performance dashboard

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In GitLab 10.4 we have improved the design of the environment performance dashboard, which displays the system and response metrics captured by Prometheus.

Now, when reviewing metrics at a specific point in time, they are clearly displayed on the hover over instead of in the chart’s legend. In an upcoming release, we will add summary metrics to the legend, displaying statistics such as the maximum throughput, or average latency over the time span.

Read through the documentation on monitoring deployed environments

Clear the Runner cache

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GitLab Runner uses a cache to speed up execution by reusing existing data between different jobs. But sometimes it leads to inconsistent behaviors, for example, when the local copy of the repository is modified by one job, and the new changes impact the execution of the following one.

In GitLab 10.4, we introduce a new button in the Pipelines page that can be used to clear any existing cache for the specific project and start fresh with a new one. This immediately solves the problem of “dirty” runs.

Read through the documentation on clearing the Runner cache

Run a scheduled pipeline manually

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Scheduled pipelines are very useful to run recurring jobs without a manual action by the user. They are normally used to perform maintenance tasks, or to create nightly builds for your software. But sometimes that exact scope is also needed on-demand, and recreating the same environment (e.g., adding custom variables) can be hard and time consuming.

GitLab 10.4 introduces the ability to run a scheduled pipeline manually, directly from the web interface: a “play” button can be found for each schedule in the list, and running the pipeline is just as simple as a click.

Read through the documentation on running scheduled pipelines immediately

Omnibus improvements

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• GitLab Mattermost version 4.5 includes Zoom plugin for video, audio, screen sharing, and much more.
• CA certificates have been updated to 2017.09.20
• GitLab Monitor has been updated to 2.4.0
• Ruby has been updated to 2.3.6
• Go based libraries such as Registry, Workhorse, and Prometheus are built with Go 1.9.2

Read through the documentation on Omnibus GitLab