Domain Names and DNS Records
Overview
We have a variety of domain names at GitLab for production, services, internal tools, and sandbox purposes. They are technically managed in a variety of ways.
The Domain Name Registration and Maintenance Policy is designed to centralize the registration, legal management, and costs associated with domain names.
As of 2022-08-01, you can no longer submit an expense report for domain names that you use for demo and sandbox purposes. See the instructions below for IT to purchase a trademark domain name, self service purchasing a non-trademark domain with Sandbox Cloud for demo and internal use cases, and transferring an existing domain name into GitLab IT managed infrastructure for ongoing renewals that are paid for by the company.
If you have any questions, please reach out to Jeff Martin or Vlad Stoianovici.
Trademark Domain Names
The full list of GitLab IT and Infrastructure managed domain names can be found in the GitLab Owned Domains spreadsheet. All recent purchase and transfer issues are linked to gitlab/it/infra#117.
If you want to purchase any domain name that includes any of our trademarks (ex. gitlab, gl, gtlb, etc.) or any domain that will host RED or ORANGE data, please use the issue template to request a domain from IT. You do not need strong justification, it just needs to be managed by IT Infrastructure for compliance reasons.
DNS Domain Purchase Request Issue Template
See Transferring Domain Names to learn more about how to transfer the domain name from a registrar you manage (ex. Namecheap, GoDaddy, etc.) to a GitLab IT Infrastructure managed registrar.
Trademark Domain DNS Records
See the tfvars.json files in config-mgmt for a list of all current DNS records that are configured for our trademark domain names.
Our less popular and underutilized domain names are manually managed in the dns-zones-4a589e31 AWS account or dns-zones-a1ce7e00 GCP project.
If you want to add or update an A, CNAME, TXT, etc record for a trademark domain name, please use the issue template to have IT Infrastructure update the record for you. We do not create subdomain records on trademark domains for demo/sandbox/test environments unless it is a staging environment for a production service.
DNS Domain Record Update Issue Template
Please open the issue and ask questions in the comments if you need guidance.
Non-Trademark Domain Names
This covers demo, internal (non-production), and sandbox use cases.
You can self service purchase a domain name of your choice (without Gitlab trademarks) that is paid for by GitLab through your Sandbox Cloud AWS account or GCP project, and you can manage the DNS records yourself. You do not need to contact IT for non-trademark domain purchases, however you can ask in #sandbox-cloud-questions if you need assistance.
Do not purchase any domain names on Namecheap, GoDaddy, or other registrars. Only domain names purchased inside of your Sandbox Cloud AWS Account or GCP Project will be paid for by GitLab. No expense reports will be approved. See the Domain Name Registration and Maintenance Policy for details.
Please ask in #sandbox-cloud-questions if you need guidance.
Demo and Sandbox Subdomains
If you use Sandbox Cloud Terraform Environments, HackyStack will automatically create a DNS subdomain for you that is automatically configured to resolve (ex. env-a1b2c3d4.gcp.gitlabsanbox.net) without needing to buy a domain name for a quick test.
It is labor intensive (aka expensive) to manually manage subdomain records for different team members as a subdomain with NS records. We spent a lot of time cleaning up past records and consider it to be too expensive to manage.
We believe it is more efficient to pay $10-20/yr for each team member to have their own domain name that they can manage how they see fit. By using the Sandbox Cloud, the costs are handled automatically without any extra work. See Non-Trademark Domain Names for instructions.
Please ask in #sandbox-cloud-questions if you need guidance.
Transferring Domain Names
If you have a trademark domain already that is registered with another registrar not managed by IT (Gandi, AWS, GCP), please open an issue to have it transferred. You will continue to manage the name servers and domain records, however IT will manage the registrar side.
DNS Domain Transfer Request Issue Template
If you have a non-trademark domain name (ex. mycooldevopsdemo.io) that you have been expensing in the past but can’t anymore due to the policy changes, you can self-service transfer it to your GitLab Sandbox Cloud AWS account (Route 53) or GCP project (Google Domains). We usually recommend GCP for most use cases, however it is your choice.
Domain Renewals
All trademark domain names are set to automatically renew. Any exceptions to this are documented in an issue for specific use cases, but are rare.
If a team member leaves GitLab, any non-trademark domain names that they purchased in their Sandbox Cloud AWS account or GCP project will not automatically renew since the parent AWS account or GCP project are shut down during offboarding.
7877c2be)