GitLab has added customizable roles to its Ultimate subscription, enabling customers to define their roles, based on the current Guest role. The minimal viable change allows Ultimate users to add one additional permission to the Guest role, which grants users the ability to view code, known as Guest+1.
Hannah Sutor, senior product manager at GitLab, explained the journey of arriving at the minimal viable change through a blog post. Sutor said that the six pre-defined roles that came with GitLab could not cater to the customer's requirements. Certain roles were excessively lenient, while others lacked the required authorizations to fulfill a task. The GitLab Ultimate subscription had free guest users. But lacking enough access to private repositories, customer feedback implied the need for a permission update.
Following the Minimal Viable Change (MVC) from GitLab’s Product Principles, the team determined that customers of GitLab with an Ultimate license should have the option to include one more authorization to the "Guest" role — the ability to view code. Termed the "Guest+1" custom role, this role can be allocated by users in GitLab.com and Self-Managed GitLab.
To set up custom roles for your group, an owner role member should ensure that there is at least one private project in the group or one of its subgroups. This enables you to see the impact of giving a guest a custom role. Next, they need to create a personal access token with API scope and use the API to create the "Guest+1" role for the root group.
The "Guest +1" custom role is created by using an API. The role named "Guest - Custom" is displayed in the user interface, and it can be assigned to a group of users to grant them access to view the code.
Source: The feature you wanted - Expanded Guest capabilities in GitLab Ultimate
In other news, GitLab released version 15 which includes enhanced SAST finding resolution. When a predefined rule is disabled or a rule is removed from the default ruleset, GitLab SAST will now automatically resolve vulnerabilities detected by Semgrep- and KICS-based analyzers.
GitLab also discussed the AI-assisted code suggestions recently, which can improve the code syntax, organization, and methods used, thereby reducing errors and increasing efficiency. These recommendations aim to optimize the code and help developers write better code in less time.
Commenting on the plan, Sutor mentioned that the customizable roles feature in GitLab will allow users to easily turn individual permissions on or off to create their custom roles, using the existing permissions table as a reference. After evaluating practical and performance aspects, the team intends to start consolidating some of the permissions.
Interested readers can also refer to this demo to configure guest users on GitLab Ultimate subscription.