GitLab 12.4 is released with several improvements for governance including an Audit API, Code Owner approvals for Protected Branches, and Access Control for Pages. Merge Request Dependencies help you orchestrate work across teams, while so many more exciting features help you be more efficient and deliver better software faster!
Merge Request Dependencies
GitLab can help you improve visibility, collaboration, and productivity. When developers work together to achieve a larger goal, their small changes often need to be merged in a specific sequence to work as intended. To simplify this, Merge Request Dependencies allow dependencies to be defined in merge requests, preventing changes from being merged in the wrong order while also improving the visibility of dependencies during code review. This feature was introduced as Cross-Project Merge Request Dependencies in 12.2 but has been renamed to Merge Request Dependencies, and expanded to support more types of dependencies. This includes both cross-project and Merge Request Dependencies within the same project.
We recognize governance is important to you. Here are a few of the key features in 12.4 that will make governance easier for you.
Audit Events API
GitLab helps you achieve end-to-end visibility across your development lifecycle while streamlining processes. To facilitate this, GitLab plays well with others and, in 12.4, is introducing an API for instance-level audit events. Audit Events are a powerful way to better understand adherance to policies. Using the new Audit Events API, administrators can obtain events programmatically and better enable powerful alerting and monitoring that meets specific needs.
Pages Access Control on GitLab.com
Access control for Pages has been available for self-managed but is now available on GitLab.com. It allows an authorized administrator to restrict access to a Pages site or make it available to the public. This is a community contribution that we are very excited to have enabled on GitLab.com!
Code Owner Approvals for Protected Branches
Another feature to aid in governance is the new Code Owner Approvals for Protected Branches. Using merge request approvals to restrict how code is pushed to protected branches is helpful for promoting code quality and implementing compliance controls. However, not all merge requests target stable branches, and not all stable branches need the same controls. In GitLab 12.4, it is possible to prevent directly pushing changes to files or merging changes without the code owner's approval for specific branches.
And much more!
There are so many great features within GitLab 12.4 that we couldn’t possibly highlight them all. A few favorites include Notifications for Releases, the ability to View Pod Logs from Any Environment, and Private Project Support for Online View of HTML Artifacts. Keep reading below to get details on every feature!
Be sure to catch the recap of our first European user conference from October 9th. The next GitLab Commit User Conference will be in San Francisco in January. Registration is now open.
