The GitLab platform (git.doit.wisc.edu) supports collaborative research and research reproducibility by allowing UW-Madison researchers to back up, version and share their code using git version control. This shared GitLab instance can be a useful tool for UW-Madison researchers and labs in the following ways.
GitLab is a code repository platform researchers can use to share code with collaborators and track versions of software. GitLab is useful for projects in which multiple collaborators are writing different parts of the code base, working with multiple versions of the software, or deploying the software for use in new projects.
Git is software that is commonly used in research to version control source code. If you want to learn more about using Git, consider taking a Software Carpentry Workshop through the Data Science Hub.
GitLab and GitHub are both web platforms that store remote copies of git repositories, allowing your code to be backed up and facilitate collaboration. The shared GitLab instance is licensed by UW-Madison and is GitLab for Campuses. GitHub.com is owned by Microsoft and is governed by individual license agreement and should not be used for proprietary code. We recommend using university-licensed tools to protect the researcher from entering into license agreements individually. Storing research objects in Campus resources protects from potential data loss.
The answer is: it depends! If you are using software that is covered by a contractual agreement with an outside party, the software license might specify terms of use or you might want to consult with a contractual specialist in your department/unit or the University Office of Legal Affairs (https://legal.wisc.edu/), before using GitLab with this software
If it is determined that you can use GitLab for your proprietary software, ensure the appropriate user attestation process and management in place. For example, make projects with proprietary software private and limit the membership as much as possible.
UW Madison encourages GitLab to be used as a collaborative platform rather than a repository to publish data as a research artifact. UW Madison Libraries and the Researcher Toolkit are great resources to determine the best repositories to share data publicly.
GitLab has several visibility options to facilitate collaboration across projects. Contributors to the project must have an active UW Madison Net ID to contribute to the project and to make pull requests. The three visibility options are:
- Public
- Internal
- Private
GitLab can be used to make your code publicly available to anyone by changing the project's visibility to public. However, contributors to your code base would have to have a UW-Madison NetID to make pull requests and contribute to the project.
Tools like GitLab are designed to support several software development practices commonly referred to as DevOps. DevOps is a term that emphasizes the importance of closely integrating the development and operations cycles of software. This makes it easier to:
- Catch and correct bugs during all stages of software development
- Shorten the time for delivering new versions and releases of the software
DevOps includes the practice of Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). This practice focuses on:
- Automating code build updates
- Testing
- Delivery
GitLab’s CI/CD features include automation tools for creating components such as pipelines for compiling and testing code.
The DevOps concept may be applicable to your research if you and collaborators are iteratively developing new versions of software that:
- Will be used by multiple individuals
- Need testing that is regularly or automatically performed
- Require bug fixes and code updates to be managed in each version
