First make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running these following apt-get commands in the terminal. It’s free and open source hence you won’t have to deal with any licensing issues. GitLab comes with GitLab CI for continuous integration. It provides a fine work flow management which gives you ability to create groups for a project, ability to fork a repository as well as it provides ability to manage large binaries with git LFS. It has lots of features like code reviews, issue tracking, activity feeds and inbuilt wiki.

You can insert your own branding in the login page and it also supports project import from GitHub and other sources to GitLab. It provides LDAP user authentication and has two factor authentication system which makes the application very secure. It is self hosted, hence you have full control over your server and the source code hosted inside. GitLab provides you web interface to edit files, directories and create merge requests. I will show you through the step by step installation Gitlab on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo’ to the commands to get root privileges. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. In many ways it is similar to GitHub, except you can install it in your own server. GitLab is widely used for software development and version control related tasks. GitLab provides you with a platform to collaborate on projects and to keep track of changes in code.

This ensures security of the code, and gives you total freedom on the number of users as well as number of repositories and number of files. Using GitLab you can host your source code on your own server. Gitlab is graphical implementation of git, it is an open source repository management and version control system.

How to install gitlab on ubuntu 16.04