My company is planning to use gitlab for team development (gitlab.com). But one thing that confuses me is how do I setup gitlab for the company?
From what I understand, it seems like a project belongs to a user (maintainer or creator). What if the user (sole maintainer) left the company? Will the project go missing?
How do a company pay the premium account for multiple users? Do each individual user need to self pay for their own account?
Would appreciate some advice on how to use gitlab.com for a company.
The most common way to set up GitLab.com for your organization that will have a number of different collaborators would be to create a top-level parent group for the company. That parent group is what will house the subscription that you’ll be purchasing for however many users you’re going to have.
Within that parent group, you can create any number of subgroups and projects within either the parent group itself or within any of the subgroups. This way, all projects are housed within the top level parent group for your company and you would only need to make sure that the users with Owner level permissions of that parent group keep their accounts active and that you have a proper offboarding process internally if one of them moves on.
Any user that you then add to the parent group will automatically have the same permission level on all subgroups and projects within that parent group. Or, if you need to be more selective about the permission level of a specific user(s) you can add them directly to a subgroup or project and they’ll only have access to that.
You can set this all up before purchasing a subscription as well. When you go to purchase a subscription for the group you’ll pay for the number of users currently in it and any subgroups and projects within. You can then add users to the group afterward and will be charged a prorated amount for those on your next renewal period.
This way none of the users in your organization need to purchase their own subscription for their own personal account. As long as they’re a member of the group you’ve created that has a subscription, they’ll be able to take advantage of that subscription while working within the group.
Where can I find information about how much support for X users costs? Is it possible to use a top level parent group for a company with a free plan as well? How much collaborators are supported then?
Unless you’ve been granted a Gold subscription as part of our open source program, support doesn’t cost anything extra and is included with all subscriptions by default. For Free plans though, support is limited. You can read more about what is and what is not support for all types of users on our support page and in our statement of support.
So the end answer is there is no such thing as a company or corporate account, just free-floating Groups under an initial user? This would seem very unattractive and I guess means that, just like AWS, etc. we have to create a generic ‘root’ user and create an account, like gitlab@mycompany.com and us that, and add various users.
@steve.mushero A group on GitLab.com isn’t inherently owned by one specific user. It can either have a single user that has Owner permissions or it can have several. The vast majority of our users that utilize groups do so with a number of different users with Owner permissions for redundancy.
Thanks @Tristan, can you clarify what working within the group means? For example, if I utilize a forking model, where I fork a private project housed within the group (I am a member of) to my own namespace, make changes to it, then create an MR to merge upstream, would I be able to take advantage of the subscription the group has throughout this whole process? Would I have access to the subscriptions’ Gitlab Features in the forked project? Access to the CI minutes in the forked project? If so, please clarify how that works.
If not, how would I be able to access the group subscription plan’s Gitlab Features and CI minutes in the forked project?
I’m in the same situation and want to make sure that I got it right. I understand how groups work, but want to be clear about the following detail:
Developers can use a single account for work and for private projects like OS development. Subscriptions are not really for an user account, but depend on the context. The company could go for bronze for example, and I could have the silver (or free, gold, …) level for my own projects. So for my own projects I could use silver features, but for the projects below the company group I would have bronze features.
@vsimon My apologies for the delay in follow-up. Working within the group means that as long as you’re working within a project that is inside of the group, you’ll have access to the features of that groups subscription. Unfortunately, this doesn’t apply to forking.
If you fork a group project to your own personal namespace, the forked version will have access to the features that the subscription applied to your personal namespace has, if any. In fact, at the moment any pipelines triggered won’t trigger in the parent project, but we’re working on a solution for that.
@domma Your understanding is 100% correct. I don’t believe many users do that, but the option is always there. If I want to have a subscription applied to my personal namespace for use with my own projects while also being a member of a group that has it’s own subscription, that’s totally fine.