GitLab Project Management - Hands-On Lab: Create an Organizational Structure in GitLab

Estimated time to complete: 30 minutes

Objectives

In GitLab, projects and subgroups help you organize your codebases and effectively manage your projects. In this lab, you will learn how to create an organizational subgroup, how to create a project, and how to add a user to a project.

Organization Namespaces: You can create subgroups under any other groups that you have access to and have permissions to create groups underneath. Your organization should have best practices documented on how groups are structured or named. If you’re not sure, you can locate another group’s members and ask one of the users with Owner role who should be able to help.

Personal Namespaces: Although you can create projects in your personal namespace (ex. https://gitlab.com/exampleuser/example-project), you cannot create groups in your personal namespace.

Security Warning: Any users that have access to parent or grandparent groups will have inherited permissions to this group. In the training environment, each student only has direct member access to their subgroup and does not have inherited member access to the parent groups. See the subgroup membership docs to learn more.

Tip: Remember that the breadcrumbs are a good way to navigate between subgroups when you’re creating a multi-level collection of groups and subgroups.

Prerequisites

1. You have already redeemed the invitation/voucher code.

2. You have signed into https://gitlab.com with your existing username.

3. You have clicked the My Group button and opened a new browser tab with the URL https://gitlab.com/gitlab-learn-labs/environments/session-{id}/iu{######}. You should see My Test Group - iu{######} as the title of the group.

Task A. Review groups and projects for GitLab’s own source code

1. In a new browser tab, navigate to https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org. This group contains all of GitLab’s product source code that is mostly open source and transparent based on our company values.

2. In the list of groups and project, click the linked name for the Frontend subgroup. You might have to scroll down or use pagination to find it on the second page.

3. Within the Frontend subgroup, you can see all of the projects and subgroups that exist as part of this group. Spend a few moments exploring some of these subgroups and projects.

Task B. Create organizational subgroups

1. In the lab environment tab, ensure that you are in your My Test Group group.

2. Click the New Subgroup button in the top right corner.

3. In the Subgroup name field, type Awesome Inc.

4. The Subgroup URL shows which namespace hierarchy that this group will be created in.

   • Do not change the Subgroup URL in this class. You will always create projects under https://gitlab.com/gitlab-learn-labs/... since this is your top-level organization group for these steps.

5. The Subgroup slug will automatically populate based on the name. Rename awesome-inc to awesome.

   • Best Practice: This slug is what will appear as the project path, which means that it is both the URL path and the folder name when you run git clone. It is a best practice to shorten this when appropriate.

6. Ensure that the Visibility level is set to Private.

   A private subgroup will ensure that the group and its projects can only be viewed by members. For more details of visibility levels, see the documentation.

7. Click the Create subgroup button.

   • You should now see the group with the title Awesome Inc and your browser URL will reflect the path at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-learn-labs/environments/session-{id}/iu{######}/awesome.

8. Congratulations! You have created your first group and are ready to create additional groups on your own. Within the Awesome Inc group, create subgroups for each of these teams at your awesome company.

   • Software
     • Core (this is a subgroup of Software, not Awesome Inc)
     • Android
     • iOS
   • Infrastructure
   • Security

Task C. Create a new project

1. Navigate to the Awesome Inc > Software > Core subgroup that you just created.

2. Click the Create new project tile.

3. Click the Create blank project tile.

4. In the Project name field, enter Family Budget Calculator.

5. Note that the project URL shows /awesome/software/core in its path. This shows that the project is in the core subgroup.

6. Leave the project slug as the default value, family-budget-calculator.

7. Set the Visibility Level to private.

   See the visibility docs to learn more. Keep in mind that any parent groups that have Private visibility will be inherited for all child groups and projects and cannot be changed.

   Training Environment Limitation: In the training environment, your group is part of a private parent group so you will not be able to make a group or project Public. To test working with public projects, you can create a project in your personal namespace.

8. Enable the Initialize repository with a README checkbox.

9. Leave Enable Static Application Security Testing (SAST) unchecked.

10. Select Create project.

Task D. Add a project member and set their role

1. In the Family Budget Calculator project, click Manage > Members in the left sidebar.

2. Click the Invite members button in the top right corner.

3. Search for and select your instructor as the user you are inviting. If you are taking the self-paced course, enter your own email address.

4. In the Select a role dropdown, select Developer. If you are taking the self-paced course, select Owner.

   See the permissions and roles docs to learn more about each role level.

5. Click the Invite button.

6. Refresh the page to see the user invited as a Direct Member.

   Users will inherit permissions from the parent group hierarchy that this project exists in. If a user already has a higher level of access in a parent group (ex. Maintainer), that access level supersedes a lower level of permission assigned at the project level (ex. Developer).

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