Developer Guide

If you want to contribute to GitLab, we advise you to setup a separate development environment for it.

Get to know GitLab

If you want to know a few things about how GitLab works, have a look behind the scenes in our (growing) series called: GitLab Under the Hood.

Setup your development environment

You can either follow the "ordinary" Installation Guide to install it on your machine or use the GitLab Vagrant VM neatly containing GitLab into a VM. Installing it in a virtual machine makes it much easier to set up all the dependencies for integration testing.

Run GitLab

1. Via foreman

bundle exec foreman start -p 3000

2. Manually

bundle exec rails s
bundle exec rake environment resque:work QUEUE=* VVERBOSE=1

Seed your database

bundle exec rake db:setup RAILS_ENV=test
bundle exec rake db:seed_fu RAILS_ENV=test

Fork, code, submit

1. Fork the project on GitHub
2. Create a feature branch
3. Code & Test
4. Push it to your fork
5. Submit a pull request

We'll accept pull requests, if:

• Your code has proper tests and all tests pass
• It can be merged without problems
• It won't break existing functionality
• It's quality code
• You describe your PR properly (motive and method)
• You provide screen shots when making changes to the UI
• We like it :)

For examples of feedback on pull requests please look at our already closed pull requests.

Run tests

# All in once
bundle exec rake gitlab:test

# Rspec
bundle exec rake spec

# Spinach
bundle exec rake spinach