GitLab

Created by: sroth80021

Gitolite v2 and later has a special group called named @all (lowercase) which refers to all users. This makes it easy, for example, to provide R access to all users, via line like this:

repo gitolite-admin RW+ = gitlab repo testing RW+ = @ all repo @ all RW+ = @ all gitlab repo foo1 ... repo foo2 ... repo foo3 ...

This is a standard gitolite conf file -- they only thing I did is I added the @ all group to the @ all repository. In the lines above, the @ all group should be lowercase and the RW+ lines should be indented.

Using this config with gitolite, any new gitlab users can automatically ssh-clone all repositories.

Unfortunately, the gitlab UI does not seem to realize that the users can access all repositories, and so the UI does not display any info from the repositories. Both in the user view, and also in the admin view, it behaves as though the user does not have access to the repositories.

It would be nice if the special group @ all was supported by the gitlab UI since I think it's a pretty common case to automatically give all corporate users at least read access to all repositories. This would simplify administration.

In our particular case, we have LDAP authentication, and managers (who often do not code) cannot see anything in GitLab unless we manually go configure their accounts to provide this access (which we do-- it just takes time). If we configured the @ all group with R capability, then the managers would be have better visibility into what's happening in the repositories.