Productivity - Setup Guide

How to set up GitLab

Otto's honest, no-fluff walkthrough. Every step here is what we'd actually do if we were sitting at your keyboard. Real gotchas first, real steps second, and a link to the personalized version at the bottom.

Read these before you start

• **The included CI minutes pool is a fixed 10,000 minutes per group on Premium regardless of headcount, and it does NOT scale with team size**, so a 30-person team on Premium can exhaust the pool in the first week of the month and start eating overage at $0.01/minute, and macOS runners bill at a 6x-12x compute-minute cost factor (effective $0.06-$0.12 per clock minute) (GitLab CI Pricing 2026 on CICDCalculator.com and Vendr GitLab marketplace, 2026). Self-hosted runners bypass this entirely - big teams should plan on self-hosting runners even if they buy the SaaS.
• Ultimate tier is where the security features (SAST, DAST, dependency scanning) actually live - Premium does not include the compliance story.
• GitLab CI YAML has its own DSL that is different enough from GitHub Actions to slow migration.
• Self-hosted upgrades between major versions have historically required careful reading of upgrade notes - do not just apt-upgrade in prod.
• Duo (GitLab's AI code assistant) is a separate add-on and priced per seat on top of tier pricing.

The 7-step setup

1. 1

   Create your GitLab account

   Sign up at the link below. Free tier available - no card required. Use your business email so you can invite teammates later.

   Open GitLab signup
2. 2

   Complete the initial onboarding

   Skip the marketing questionnaires when you can. Fill only the fields that actually configure the product - name, timezone, your first workspace or project. If GitLab pushes you into a setup wizard, take it - it usually accelerates the first productive session.

3. 3

   Connect your existing tools

   Wire GitLab into the rest of your stack. The integrations that most people set up first: Jira, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jenkins, Kubernetes (native), AWS, GCP, Azure, Datadog, Sentry, PagerDuty, Snyk, Terraform Cloud, native container/package registries, webhooks, REST + GraphQL APIs. GitLab's story is "one tool" - integrations that matter are mostly the ones GitLab already ships.. Do these before importing data - clean integration first, data second.

4. 4

   Import your existing data (only what you'll actually use)

   Do NOT bulk-import everything. Import the last 30 days of the ONE workflow you're moving over first. Prove it works. Then import more. Big-bang migrations are how GitLab deployments die in month 3.

5. 5

   Set up your first real workflow

   Pick the single most-frequent task you'll do in GitLab - the daily-driver workflow. Configure it end-to-end. Use it live for a week. Do not touch any other feature yet. Adoption failure comes from teams trying to use everything on day one instead of the one thing that actually pays.

6. 6

   Add your team (if applicable) and set access

   Once your solo workflow works, invite one teammate at a time. Watch them use it. The friction points you missed are the ones they hit. Fix those before scaling to more users. Never invite 20 people at once - you'll get 20 confused people and 0 useful feedback.

7. 7

   Compound with the right pairings

   Recommend GitLab when: business_size is 25+, industry is tech/enterprise/financial services/healthcare, pain_points include "we pay for GitHub + a separate CI + a separate security scanner and want to consolidate," or the team needs self-hosted or air-gapped git. Do NOT recommend for solo developers, small startups that live on GitHub's community and Actions marketplace, or teams whose OSS presence depends on GitHub visibility. Flag that the included CI pool does not scale with headcount and tha...