What is the Glossary
This contains a simplified list and definitions of some of the terms that you will encounter in your day to day activities when working with GitLab. Please add any terms that you discover that you think would be useful for others.
2FA
User authentication by combination of 2 different steps during login. This allows for more security.
Access Levels
Process of selective restriction to create, view, modify or delete a resource based on a set of assigned permissions. See, GitLab's Permission Guidelines
Active Directory (AD)
A Microsoft based directory service for windows domain networks. It uses LDAP technology under the hood
Agile
Building and delivering software in phases/parts rather than trying to build everything at once then delivering to the user/client. The later is known as a WaterFall model
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
Entire product lifecycle management process for an application. From requirements management, development and testing until deployment.
Artifactory
Version control for binaries.
Artifacts
objects (usually binary and large) created by a build process
Atlassian
A company that develops software products for developers and project managers including Bitbucket, Jira, Hipchat, Confluence, Bamboo. See Atlassian
Audit Log
*** Needs definition here
Auto Defined User Group
User groups are a way of centralizing control over important management tasks, particularly access control and password policies. A simple example of such groups are the users and the admins groups. In most of the cases these groups are auto defined in terms of access, rules of usage, conditions to be part of, etc...
Bamboo
Atlassian's CI tool similar to GitLab CI and Jenkins
Basic Subscription
Entry level subscription for GitLab EE currently available in packs of 10 see Basic subscription
Bitbucket
Atlassian's web hosting service for Git and Mercurial Projects i.e. GitLab.com competitor
Branch
A branch is a parallel version of a repository. Allows you to work on the repository without you affecting the "master" branch. Allows you to make changes without affecting the current "live" version. When you have made all your changes to your branch you can then merge to the master and to make the changes fo "live".
Branded Login
Having your own logo on your GitLab instance login page instead of the GitLab logo.
CEPH
is a distributed object store and file system designed to provide excellent performance, reliability and scalability.
Clone
A copy of a repository stored on your machine that allows you to use your own editor without being online, but still tracks the changes made remotely.
Code Review
Examination of a progam's code. The main aim is to maintain high standards quality of code that is being shipped.
Code Snippet
A small amount of code. Usually for the purpose of showing other developers how to do something specific or reproduce a problem.
Collaborator
Person with read and write access to a repository who has been invited by repository owner.
Commit
Is a change (revision) to a file, and also creates an ID that allows you to see revision history and who made the changes.
Community
Everyone who is using GitLab
Confluence
Atlassian's product for collaboration of documents and projects.
Continuous Deivery
Continuous delivery is a series of practices designed to ensure that code can be rapidly and safely deployed to production by delivering every change to a production-like environment and ensuring business applications and services function as expected through rigorous automated testing.
Continuous Deployment
Continuous deployment is the next step of continuous delivery: Every change that passes the automated tests is deployed to production automatically.
Continuous Integration
A process that involves adding new code commits to source code with the combined code being run on an automated test to ensure that the changes do not break the software.
Contributor
Term used to a person contributing to an Open Source Project.
Data Centre
Atlassian product for High Availability.
Deploy Keys
An SSH key stored on the your server that grants access to a single GitLab repository. This is used by a GitLab runner to clone a project's code so that tests can be run against the checked out code.
Developer
For us (GitLab) this means a software developer, i.e. someone who makes software. It is also one of the levels of access in our multi level approval system.
Diff
Is the difference between two commits, or saved changes. This will also be shown visually after the changes.
Docker
Containers wrap up a piece of software in a complete filesystem that contains everything it needs to run: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries – anything you can install on a server. This guarantees that it will always run the same, regardless of the environment it is running in.
Fork
Your own copy of a repository that allows you to make changes to the repository without affecting the original.
Gerrit
A code review tool built on top of Git.
Git Hooks
Are scripts you can use to trigger actions at certain points.
GitHost.io
Is a single-tenant solution that provides GitLab CE or EE as a managed service. GitLab Inc. is responsible for installing, updating, hosting, and backing up customers own private and secure GitLab instance.
GitHub
A web-based Git repository hosting service with an enterprise offering. Its main features are: issue tracking, pull request with code review, abundancy of integrations and wiki. As of April 2016, the service has over 14 million users. It offers free public repos, private repos and enterprise services are paid.
GitLab CE
Our free on Premise solution with >100,000 users
GitLab CI
Our own Continuos Integration feature that is shipped with each instance
GitLab EE
Our premium on premise solution that currently has Basic, Standard and Plus subscription packages with additional features and support.
GitLab.com
Our free SaaS for public and private repositories.
Gitolite
Is basically an access layer that sits on top of Git. Users are granted access to repos via a simple config file and you as an admin only needs the users public SSH key and a username from the user.
Gitorious
A web based hosting service for projects using Git. It was acquired by GitLab and we discontinued the service. Gitorious Acquisition Blog Post
HADR
Sometimes written HA/DR. High Availability for Disaster Recovery. Usually refers to a strategy having a failover server in place in case the main server fails.
Hip Chat
Atlassian's real time chat application for teams. Competitor to Slack, RocketChat and MatterMost.
High Availability
Refers to a system or component that is continuously operational for a desirably long length of time. Availability can be measured relative to "100% operational" or "never failing."
Issue Tracker
A tool used to manage, organize, and maintain a list of issues, making it easier for an organization to manage.
Jenkins
An Open Source CI tool written using the Java programming language. Does the same job as GitLab CI, Bamboo, Travis CI. It is extremely popular. see Jenkins
Jira
Atlassian's project management software. i.e. a complex issue tracker. SeeJira
Kerberos
A network authentication protocol that uses secret-key cryptography for security.
Kubernetes
An open source container cluster manager originally designed by Google. It's basically a platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers over clusters of hosts.
Labels
An identifier to describe a group of one or more specific file revisions
LDAP
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol - basically its a directory (electronic address book) with user information e.g. name, phone_number etc
LDAP User Authentication
Allowing GitLab to sign in people from an LDAP server i.e. Allow people whose names are on the electronic user directory server) to be able to use their LDAP accounts to login.
LDAP Group Sync
Allows you to synchronize the members of a GitLab group with one or more LDAP groups.
Git LFS
Git Large File Storage. A way to enable git to handle large binary files by using reference pointers within small text files to point to the large files.
Linux
An operating system like Windows or OS X. It is mostly used by software developers and on servers.
Markdown
Is a lightweight markup language with plain text formatting syntax designed so that it can be converted to HTML and many other formats using a tool by the same name. Markdown is often used to format readme files, for writing messages in online discussion forums, and to create rich text using a plain text editor.
Maria DB
A community developed fork/variation of MySQL. MySQL is owned by Oracle.
Master
Name of the default branch in every git repository.
Mercurial
A free distributed version control system like Git. Think of it as a competitor to Git.
Merge
Takes changes from one branch, and applies them into another branch.
Meteor
A hip platform for building javascript apps.Meteor
Milestones
Allows you to track the progress on issues, and merge requests, which allows you to get a snapshot of the progress made.
Mirror Repositories
You can set up a project to automatically have its branches, tags, and commits updated from an upstream repository. This is useful when a repository you're interested in is located on a different server, and you want to be able to browse its content and its activity using the familiar GitLab interface.
MIT License
A type of software license. It lets people do anything with your code with proper attribution and without warranty. It is the most common license for open source applications written in Ruby on Rails. GitLab CE is issued under this license. This means, you can download the code, modify it as you want even build a new commercial product using the underlying code and its not illegal. The only condition is that there is no form of waranty provided by GitLab so whatever happens if you use the code is your own problem.
Mondo
*** Needs definition here
Multi LDAP Server
*** Needs definition here
My SQL
A relational database. Currently only supported if you are using EE. It is owned by Oracle.
Namespace
In computing, a namespace is a set of symbols that are used to organize objects of various kinds, so that these objects may be referred to by name.
Prominent examples include:
- file systems are namespaces that assign names to files;
- programming languages organize their variables and subroutines in namespaces;
- computer networks and distributed systems assign names to resources, such as computers, printers, websites, (remote) files, etc.
Nginx
(pronounced "engine x") is a web server. It can act as a reverse proxy server for HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP protocols, as well as a load balancer and an HTTP cache.
oAuth
Is an open standard for authorization, commonly used as a way for Internet users to log into third party websites using their Microsoft, Google, Facebook or Twitter accounts without exposing their password.
Omnibus Packages
Omnibus is a way to package the different services and tools required to run GitLab, so that users can install it without as much work.
On Premise
On your own server. In GitLab, this refers to the ability to download GitLab EE/GitLab CE and host it on your own server rather than using GitLab.com which is hosted by GitLab Inc's servers.
Open Source Software
Software for which the original source code is freely available and may be redistributed and modified.
Owner
This is the most powerful person on a GitLab project. He has the permissions of all the other users plus the additional permission of being able to destroy i.e. delete the project
PaaS
Typically referred to in regards to application development, it is a model in which a cloud provider delivers hardware and software tools to its users as a service
Perforce
The company that produces Helix. A commercial, proprietary, centralised VCS well known for it's ability to version files of any size and type. They OEM a re-branded version of GitLab called "GitSwarm" that is tightly integrated with their "GitFusion" product, which in turn represents a portion of a Helix repository (called a depot) as a git repo
Phabricator
Is a suite of web-based software development collaboration tools, including the Differential code review tool, the Diffusion repository browser, the Herald change monitoring tool, the Maniphest bug tracker and the Phriction wiki. Phabricator integrates with Git, Mercurial, and Subversion.
Piwik Analytics
An open source analytics software to help you analyze web traffic. It is similar to google analytics only that google analytics is not open source and information is stored by google while in Piwik the information is stored in your own server hence fully private.
Plus Subscription
GitLab Premium EE subscription that includes training and dedicated Account Management and Service Engineer and complete support package Plus subscription
PostgreSQL
A relational database. Touted as the most advanced open source database.
Protected Branches
A feature that protects branches from unauthorized pushes, force pushing or deletion.
Pull
Git command to synchronize the local repository with the remote repository, by fetching all remote changes and merging them into the local repository.
Puppet
A popular devops automation tool
Push
Git command to send commits from the local repository to the remote repository.
RE Read Only
Permissions to see a file and it's contents, but not change it
Rebase
Moves a branch from one commit to another. This allows you to re-write your project's history.
Git Repository
Storage location of all files which are tracked by git.
Requirements management
*** Needs definition here
Revision
*** Needs definition here
Revision Control
Also known as version control or source control, is the management of changes to documents, computer programs, large web sites, and other collections of information. Changes are usually identified by a number or letter code, termed the "revision number", "revision level", or simply "revision".
RocketChat
An open source chat application for teams. Very similar to Slack only that is is open-source.
Runners
Actual build machines/containers that run/execute tests you have specified to be run on GitLab CI
SaaS
Software as a service. Software is hosted centrally and accessed on-demand i.e. when you want to. This refers to GitLab.com in our scenario
SCM
Software Configuration Management. Often used by people when they mean Version Control
Scrum
An Agile framework designed to help complete complex (typically) software projects. It's made up of several parts: product requirments backlog, sprint plannnig, sprint (development), sprint review, retrospec (analyzing the sprint). The goal is to end up with potentially shippable products.
Scrum Board
The board used to track the status and progress of each of the sprint backlog items.
Slack
Real time messaging app for teams. Used internally by GitLab
Slave Servers
Also known as secondary servers. They help to spread the load over multiple machines, they also provide backups when the master/primary server crashes.
Source Code
Program code as typed by a computer programmer. i.e. it has not yet been compiled/translated by the computer to machine language.
SSH Key
A unique identifier of a computer. It is used to identify computers without the need for a password. e.g. On GitLab I have added the ssh key of all my work machines so that the GitLab instance knows that it can accept code pushes and pulls from this trusted machines whose keys are I have added.
SSO
Single Sign On. An authentication process that allows you enter one username and password to access multiple applications.
Standard Subscription
Our mid range EE subscription that includes 24/7 support, support for High Availability Standard Subscription
Stash
Atlassian's Git On-Premises solution. Think of it as Atlassian's GitLab EE. It is now known as BitBucket Server.
Subversion
Non-proprietary, centralized version control system.
Sudo
A program that allows you to perform superuser/administrator actions on Unix Operating Systems e.g. Linux, OS X. It actually stands for 'superuser do'
SVN
Abbreviation for Subversion.
Tag
Represents a version of a particular branch at a moment in time.
Tool Stack
Set of tools used in a process to achieve a common outcome. E.g. set of tools used in Application Lifecycle Management.
Trac
An Open Source project management and bug tracking web application.
User
Anyone interacting with the software.
VCS
Version Control Software
Waterfall
A model of building software that involves collecting all requirements from the customer, then building and refining all the requirements and finally delivering the COMPLETE software to the customer that meets all the requirements specified by the customer
Webhooks
A way for for an app to provide other applications with real-time information. e.g. send a message to a slack channel when a commit is pushed
Wiki
A website/system that allows for collaborative editing of its content by the users. In programming, they usually contain documentation of how to use the software