GitLab joins the Archive

GitLab, a major web-based, public git repository forge, is now fully archived into the Software Heritage archive. We will continue to periodically update this section of the archive, to keep it up-to-date with changes pushed to repositories hosted on gitlab.com.

GitLab is used by NASA, CERN, and the GNOME Foundation. The software powering gitlab.com is Free Software, enabling individuals to host code on their own computers and servers, allowing them the choice of using an existing instance or running their own.

As of today, we have ingested the public instance of GitLab running at gitlab.com. With over 750,000 new repositories now archived, we’re one step further along carrying out our mission to capture the sum of human (source code) knowledge in a single logical place. However, this is only the main instance being run by GitLab itself, there are numerous other GitLab instances being run independently.

A number of free and open source software projects make their home on gitlab.com. The most popular projects on the site include mobile app management client F-Droid and vector illustrator Inkscape. Both F-Droid and Inkscape are now also available from the Software Heritage archive.

In order to ingest gitlab.com, we built a new lister to work with GitLab. This software component, based on GitLab APIs, works not just on gitlab.com, but any instance of GitLab. If you’re hosting your own instance of GitLab, you can rely on this lister to help archive projects you host into Software Heritage. As an example, we’ve used this to also ingest inria’s instance of GitLab, adding another 1,026 repositories to the archive. As we have already worked with other instances of Git, we were able to reuse the Git loader we previously made.

Do you know of another GitLab instance that we haven’t archived yet? Leave a comment and we’ll look into it.