Contributor and Development Docs

Learn the processes and technical information needed for contributing to GitLab.

This content is intended for members of the GitLab Team as well as community contributors. Content specific to the GitLab Team should instead be included in the Handbook.

For information on using GitLab to work on your own software projects, see the GitLab user documentation.

For information on working with GitLab's API, see the API documentation.

For information on how to install, configure, update, and upgrade your own GitLab instance, see the administration documentation.

Get started

• Set up GitLab's development environment with GitLab Development Kit (GDK)
• GitLab contributing guide
  • Issues workflow for more information on:
    • Issue tracker guidelines.
    • Triaging.
    • Labels.
    • Feature proposals.
    • Issue weight.
    • Regression issues.
    • Technical or UX debt.
  • Merge requests workflow for more information on:
    • Merge request guidelines.
    • Contribution acceptance criteria.
    • Definition of done.
    • Dependencies.
  • Style guides
  • Implement design & UI elements
• GitLab Architecture Overview
• Rake tasks for development

Processes

Must-reads:

• Guide on adapting existing and introducing new components
• Code review guidelines for reviewing code and having code reviewed
• Database review guidelines for reviewing database-related changes and complex SQL queries, and having them reviewed
• Secure coding guidelines
• Pipelines for the GitLab project

Complementary reads:

• GitLab core team & GitLab Inc. contribution process
• Security process for developers
• Guidelines for implementing Enterprise Edition features
• Danger bot
• Generate a changelog entry with bin/changelog
• Requesting access to Chatops on GitLab.com (for GitLab team members)
• Patch release process for developers
• Adding a new service component to GitLab

Development guidelines review

When you submit a change to GitLab's development guidelines, request a review from:

• A member of your team or group, to check for technical accuracy.
• For significant changes or proposals, request review from:
  • Engineering managers (FE, BE, DB, Security, UX, and others), according to the subject or process you're proposing.
  • The VP of Development (DRI) (@clefelhocz1), for final approval of the new or changed guidelines.
• The Technical Writer assigned to dev guidelines, to review the content for consistency and adherence to documentation guidelines.

UX and Frontend guides

• GitLab Design System for building GitLab with existing CSS styles and elements
• Frontend guidelines
• Emoji guide

Backend guides

• GitLab utilities
• Issuable-like Rails models
• Logging
• API style guide for contributing to the API
• GraphQL API style guide for contributing to the GraphQL API
• Sidekiq guidelines for working with Sidekiq workers
• Working with Gitaly
• Manage feature flags
• Licensed feature availability
• Dealing with email/mailers
• Shell commands in the GitLab codebase
• Gemfile guidelines
• Pry debugging
• Sidekiq debugging
• Accessing session data
• Gotchas to avoid
• Avoid modules with instance variables if possible
• How to dump production data to staging
• Working with the GitHub importer
• Import/Export development documentation
• Test Import Project
• Elasticsearch integration docs
• Working with Merge Request diffs
• Kubernetes integration guidelines
• Permissions
• Guidelines for reusing abstractions
• DeclarativePolicy framework
• How Git object deduplication works in GitLab
• Geo development
• Routing
• Repository mirroring
• Git LFS
• Developing against interacting components or features
• File uploads
• Auto DevOps development guide
• Mass Inserting Models
• Value Stream Analytics development guide
• Issue types vs first-class types
• Application limits
• Redis guidelines
• Rails initializers
• Code comments
• Renaming features
• Windows Development on GCP
• Code Intelligence
• Approval Rules
• Feature categorization
• Wikis development guide
• Newlines style guide
• Image scaling guide

Performance guides

• Instrumentation for Ruby code running in production environments.
• Performance guidelines for writing code, benchmarks, and certain patterns to avoid.
• Merge request performance guidelines for ensuring merge requests do not negatively impact GitLab performance
• Profiling a URL, measuring performance using Sherlock, or tracking down N+1 queries using Bullet.
• Cached queries guidelines, for tracking down N+1 queries masked by query caching, memory profiling and why should we avoid cached queries.

Database guides

See database guidelines.

Integration guides

• Jira Connect app
• Security Scanners
• Secure Partner Integration
• How to run Jenkins in development environment

Testing guides

• Testing standards and style guidelines
• Frontend testing standards and style guidelines

Refactoring guides

• Refactoring guidelines

Deprecation guides

• Deprecation guidelines

Documentation guides

• Writing documentation
• Documentation style guide
• Markdown

Internationalization (i18n) guides

• Introduction
• Externalization
• Translation

Product Analytics guides

• Product Analytics guide
• Usage Ping guide
• Snowplow guide

Experiment guide

• Introduction

Build guides

• Building a package for testing purposes

Compliance

• Licensing for ensuring license compliance

Go guides

• Go Guidelines

Shell Scripting guides

• Shell scripting standards and style guidelines

Domain-specific guides

• CI/CD development documentation

Other Development guides

• Defining relations between files using projections
• Reference processing
• Compatibility with multiple versions of the application running at the same time
• Features inside .gitlab/

Other GitLab Development Kit (GDK) guides

• Run full Auto DevOps cycle in a GDK instance
• Using GitLab Runner with the GDK
• Using the Web IDE terminal with the GDK