GitLab 16.9 released with wider Beta access for Duo Chat
GitLab 16.9 released with GitLab Duo Chat, usability improvements to the CI/CD variables page, more options for auto-canceling pipelines and much more!
These are just a few highlights from the 80+ improvements in this release. Read on to check out all of the great updates below.
To the wider GitLab community, thank you for the 200+ contributions you provided to GitLab 16.9!
At GitLab, everyone can contribute and we couldn't have done it without you!
To preview what's coming in next month’s release, check out our Upcoming Releases page, which includes our 16.10 release kickoff video.
The last part of reviewing a merge request is communicating the outcome. While approving was unambiguous, leaving comments was not. They required the author to read your comments, then determine if the comments were purely informational, or described needed changes. Now, when you complete your review, you can select from three options:
Comment: Submit general feedback without explicitly approving.
Approve: Submit feedback and approve the changes.
Request changes: Submit feedback that should be addressed before merging.
The sidebar now shows the outcome of your review next to your name. Currently, ending your review with Request changes doesn’t block the merge request from being merged, but it provides extra context to other participants in the merge request.
You can leave feedback about the Request changes feature in our feedback issue.
In GitLab 16.9, we have released a series of improvements to the CI/CD variables user experience. We have improved the variables creation flow through changes including:
Currently, to use the auto-cancel redundant pipeline feature, you must set jobs that can be cancelled as interruptible: true to determine whether or not a pipeline can be cancelled. But this only applies to jobs that are actively running when GitLab tries to cancel the pipeline. Any jobs that have not yet started (are in “pending” status) are also considered safe to cancel, regardless of their interruptible configuration.
This lack of flexibility hinders users who want more control over which exact jobs can be cancelled by the auto-cancel pipeline feature. To address this limitation, we are pleased to announce the introduction of the auto_cancel:on_new_commit keywords with more granular control over job cancellation. If the legacy behavior did not work for you, you now have the option to configure the pipeline to only cancel jobs that are explicitly set with interruptible: true, even if they haven’t started yet. You can also set jobs to never be automatically cancelled.
With this release, you can enable Jira issues for all projects in a GitLab group. Previously, you could only enable Jira issues for each GitLab project individually.
Completed migrations of GitLab groups and projects by direct transfer have displayed badges (Complete, Partially completed, and Failed)
to inform users about the general end result of the migration. Users could also access a list of items that were not imported, by clicking on the See failures link.
However, for a partially-imported project, there was no quick way to understand how many items of each type were successfully imported and how many were not.
In this release, we added import results statistics for groups and projects. To access the statistics, select the Details link on the direct transfer history page.
To improve the tracking of development workflows in GitLab, the Value Stream Analytics has been extended with a new stage event: Issue first added to iteration. You can use this event to detect problems caused by a lack of agility from teams planning too far ahead or execution challenges in teams that have issues rolling over from iteration to iteration. For example, you can now add a “Planned” stage that starts when Issue first added to iteration and ends when the Issue first assigned.
Previously, Git access control options on GitLab.com relied on credentials set up in the user account. Now you can set up a process to make Git access possible using only SSH certificates. You can also use these certificates to sign commits.
When managing a GitLab Runner Fleet at scale, you have told us that knowing which projects use the most compute minutes on the runners is critical. For you, this information is essential to help teams optimize CI/CD pipelines and also help you make the right decisions about fleet cost optimization.
Now, the runner compute usage by project metric card, a complement to the previously released CI/CD compute minutes export by CSV feature, is available in the Runner Fleet Dashboard. You can see the top projects that consume instance runner minutes, and the most used instance runners in your GitLab environment.
When using the GitLab Terraform registry, it is important to have a cross-project view of all your modules. Until recently, the user interface has been available only at the project level. If your group had a complex structure, you might have had difficulty finding and validating your modules.
From GitLab 16.9, you can view all of your group and subgroup modules in GitLab. The increased visibility provides a better understanding of your registry, and decreases the likelihood of name collisions.
We’ve made reporting and stability improvements to Operational Container Scanning (OCS). Notably, the Trivy report size limit has been increased, which provides a more stable experience for users. Expanding the Trivy report size from 10MB to 100MB allows customers who were constrained by the report size limit to leverage OCS in securing container images in their cluster.
With this change to OCS, users who run gitlab-agent in FIPS mode cannot run Operational Container Scanning. For more details on this, see our documentation and please provide feedback in issue #440849.
The rule changes are included in updated versions of the Semgrep-based GitLab SAST analyzer.
This update is automatically applied on GitLab 16.0 or newer unless you’ve pinned SAST analyzers to a specific version.
We’re working on more SAST rule improvements in epic 10907.
Previously, if a group had LDAP sync enabled, administrators were not able to invite or remove any users from that group. Now, administrators can use the group and project members API to invite service account users to or remove those users from a group with LDAP sync. Administrators still cannot invite human users to or remove those users from a group with LDAP sync. This ensures that LDAP group sync is the single source of truth for human user account membership, while allowing the flexibility to use service accounts to add automations to LDAP-synced groups.
GitLab now records an audit event when a custom role is updated or deleted. This event is important to identify if permissions have been added or changed in case of privilege escalation.
Group Owners that have enterprise users can now use both the user management UI and the group and project members API to see those users’ email addresses. Previously, only provisioned users’ email addresses were returned.
This release adds full support for Kubernetes version 1.29, released in December 2023. If you deploy your apps to Kubernetes, you can now upgrade your connected clusters to the most recent version and take advantage of all its features.
You can read more about our Kubernetes support policy and other supported Kubernetes versions.
In GitLab 16.5, we introduced the report with the GitLab Standard - a set of common compliance requirements all compliance teams should monitor. The standard helps
you understand which projects meet these requirements, which ones fall short, and how to bring them into compliance. Over time, we’ll be introducing more standards
into the reporting.
In this milestone, we’ve made some improvements which will make reporting more robust and actionable. These include:
With this release, we’ve added REST API support for the GitLab for Slack app.
You cannot create a GitLab for Slack app from the API. Instead, you must install the app from the GitLab UI. You can then retrieve the integration settings and update or disable the app for a project.
You can now visualize your work in progress limits in a board list. When a limit has been exceeded, an indicator line will appear in the list to help you understand which items are over the limit and manage the list accordingly.
In GitLab 16.2, we released the rich text editor as an alternative to the plain text editor. The rich text editor provides a “what you see is what you get” editing interface, and an extensible foundation for additional development. Until this release, however, the rich text editor was available only in issues, epics, and merge requests.
With GitLab 16.9, the rich text editor is now available in:
Organizations might want to control which user roles are able to cancel a pipeline. Previously, anyone who could run a pipeline could also cancel a pipeline. Now, a project Maintainer is able to update a setting which restricts pipeline and job cancellation to specific roles, or even prevents cancellation completely!
We’re also releasing GitLab Runner 16.9 today! GitLab Runner is the lightweight, highly-scalable agent that runs your CI/CD jobs and sends the results back to a GitLab instance. GitLab Runner works in conjunction with GitLab CI/CD, the open-source continuous integration service included with GitLab.
You can use the GitLab package registry to publish and download Terraform modules. By default, you cannot publish the same module name and version more than once per project.
However, you might want to allow duplicate uploads, especially for releases. In this release, GitLab expands the group setting for the package registry so you can allow or deny duplicate modules.
We resolved the following bugs during the 16.9 release milestone:
Browser-based DAST errors when attempting to get the response body for cached resources when the browser has transitioned to a new page. See the issue for more details.
Browser-based DAST crawl tasks are not running in parallel, causing performance degradation. See the issue for more details.
We’ve improved how security findings are shown in the GitLab Workflow extension for Visual Studio Code (VS Code).
You can now see more details of your security findings that weren’t previously shown, including:
Full descriptions, with rich-text formatting.
The solution to the vulnerability, if one is available.
A link to the location where the problem occurs in your codebase.
Links to more information about the type of vulnerability discovered.
We’ve also:
Improved how the extension shows the status of security scans before results are ready.
Self-managed users can now seamlessly access Service Ping data through a REST API connection, facilitating direct integration with downstream systems. This represents a significant improvement over the previous method of file download. The new approach offers self-managed users a more efficient and real-time means of conducting customized analysis and deriving specific insights from their GitLab usage data.
The Environment auto_stop_in functionality was updated to run the job from the last finished pipeline, instead of the last successful pipeline. This avoids edge cases where the auto stop job can not run because of not having any successful pipelines.
This behaviour might be considered a breaking change in some situations. The new behaviour is currently behind a feature flag, and will become the default in 17.0, and at the same time, we are going to deprecate the old behaviour to be removed from GitLab in 18.0. We recommend everyone to start transitioning or to configure the feature flag immediately to minimize the risks of the breaking change at the first 17.x upgrade.
Administrators can now add text guidelines that are visible to users with permissions to manage members on the Members page of a group or project. Administrators can access these guidelines in the Appearance section of the Admin Area settings.
Guidelines are helpful for teams that use external tooling to manage members of groups or projects. For instance, the guideline can link to predefined groups that users should use instead of managing membership for individual members.
Thank you @bufferoverflow for this community contribution!
If you belong to a group that requires SAML SSO authentication, but you do not have a valid session for that group, a banner is displayed that prompts you to refresh your session. Previously, issues and merge requests were not displayed when a session had expired, but this was not clear to the user. Now, it is clear to users when they must reauthenticate to see all of their work items.
As a GitLab administrator, you can now set the maximum number of Elasticsearch code-indexing background jobs that can run concurrently. Previously, you could only limit the number of concurrent jobs by creating dedicated Sidekiq processes.
