GitLab.com settings (FREE SAAS)

This page contains information about the settings that are used on GitLab.com, available to GitLab SaaS customers.

See some of these settings on the instance configuration page of GitLab.com.

Password requirements

GitLab.com has the following requirements for passwords on new accounts and password changes:

• Minimum character length 8 characters.
• Maximum character length 128 characters.
• All characters are accepted. For example, ~, !, @, #, $, %, ^, &, *, (), [], _, +, =, and -.

SSH key restrictions

GitLab.com uses the default SSH key restrictions.

SSH host keys fingerprints

Below are the fingerprints for SSH host keys on GitLab.com. The first time you connect to a GitLab.com repository, one of these keys is displayed in the output.

SSH known_hosts entries

Add the following to .ssh/known_hosts to skip manual fingerprint confirmation in SSH:

gitlab.com ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIAfuCHKVTjquxvt6CM6tdG4SLp1Btn/nOeHHE5UOzRdf
gitlab.com ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQCsj2bNKTBSpIYDEGk9KxsGh3mySTRgMtXL583qmBpzeQ+jqCMRgBqB98u3z++J1sKlXHWfM9dyhSevkMwSbhoR8XIq/U0tCNyokEi/ueaBMCvbcTHhO7FcwzY92WK4Yt0aGROY5qX2UKSeOvuP4D6TPqKF1onrSzH9bx9XUf2lEdWT/ia1NEKjunUqu1xOB/StKDHMoX4/OKyIzuS0q/T1zOATthvasJFoPrAjkohTyaDUz2LN5JoH839hViyEG82yB+MjcFV5MU3N1l1QL3cVUCh93xSaua1N85qivl+siMkPGbO5xR/En4iEY6K2XPASUEMaieWVNTRCtJ4S8H+9
gitlab.com ecdsa-sha2-nistp256 AAAAE2VjZHNhLXNoYTItbmlzdHAyNTYAAAAIbmlzdHAyNTYAAABBBFSMqzJeV9rUzU4kWitGjeR4PWSa29SPqJ1fVkhtj3Hw9xjLVXVYrU9QlYWrOLXBpQ6KWjbjTDTdDkoohFzgbEY=

Mail configuration

GitLab.com sends emails from the mg.gitlab.com domain by using Mailgun, and has its own dedicated IP addresses:

• 161.38.202.219
• 159.135.226.146
• 192.237.158.143
• 198.61.254.136
• 23.253.183.236
• 69.72.35.190

The IP addresses for mg.gitlab.com are subject to change at any time.

Service Desk custom mailbox

On GitLab.com, there's a mailbox configured for Service Desk with the email address: contact-project+%{key}@incoming.gitlab.com. To use this mailbox, configure the custom suffix in project settings.

Backups

See our backup strategy.

To back up an entire project on GitLab.com, you can export it either:

• Through the UI.
• Through the API. You can also use the API to programmatically upload exports to a storage platform, such as Amazon S3.

With exports, be aware of what is and is not included in a project export.

GitLab is built on Git, so you can back up just the repository of a project by cloning it to another computer. Similarly, you can clone a project's wiki to back it up. All files uploaded after August 22, 2020 are included when cloning.

Delayed project deletion (PREMIUM SAAS)

Top-level groups created after August 12, 2021 have delayed project deletion enabled by default. Projects are permanently deleted after a seven-day delay.

If you are on:

• Premium tier and above, you can disable this by changing the group setting.
• Free tier, you cannot disable this setting or restore projects.

Inactive project deletion

Inactive project deletion is disabled on GitLab.com.

Alternative SSH port

GitLab.com can be reached by using a different SSH port for git+ssh.

An example ~/.ssh/config is the following:

Host gitlab.com
  Hostname altssh.gitlab.com
  User git
  Port 443
  PreferredAuthentications publickey
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/gitlab

GitLab Pages

Below are the settings for GitLab Pages.

The maximum size of your Pages site is also regulated by the artifacts maximum size, which is part of GitLab CI/CD.

There are also rate limits set for GitLab Pages.

GitLab CI/CD

Below are the current settings regarding GitLab CI/CD. Any settings or feature limits not listed here are using the defaults listed in the related documentation.

Package registry limits

The maximum file size for a package uploaded to the GitLab Package Registry varies by format:

Account and limit settings

GitLab.com has the following account limits enabled. If a setting is not listed, the default value is the same as for self-managed instances:

If you are near or over the repository size limit, you can either reduce your repository size with Git or purchase additional storage.

NOTE: git push and GitLab project imports are limited to 5 GB per request through Cloudflare. Git LFS and imports other than a file upload are not affected by this limit. Repository limits apply to both public and private projects.

IP range

GitLab.com uses the IP ranges 34.74.90.64/28 and 34.74.226.0/24 for traffic from its Web/API fleet. This whole range is solely allocated to GitLab. You can expect connections from webhooks or repository mirroring to come from those IPs and allow them.

GitLab.com is fronted by Cloudflare. For incoming connections to GitLab.com, you might need to allow CIDR blocks of Cloudflare (IPv4 and IPv6).

For outgoing connections from CI/CD runners, we are not providing static IP addresses. All GitLab.com shared runners are deployed into Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Any IP-based firewall can be configured by looking up all IP address ranges or CIDR blocks for GCP.

Hostname list

Add these hostnames when you configure allow-lists in local HTTP(S) proxies, or other web-blocking software that governs end-user computers. Pages on GitLab.com load content from these hostnames:

• gitlab.com
• *.gitlab.com
• *.gitlab-static.net
• *.gitlab.io
• *.gitlab.net

Documentation and Company pages served over docs.gitlab.com and about.gitlab.com also load certain page content directly from common public CDN hostnames.

Webhooks

The following limits apply for webhooks.

Rate limits

The number of times a webhook can be called per minute, per top-level namespace. The limit varies depending on your plan and the number of seats in your subscription.

Other limits

For self-managed instance limits, see Webhook rate limit and Number of webhooks.

Runner SaaS

Runner SaaS is the hosted, secure, and managed build environment you can use to run CI/CD jobs for your GitLab.com hosted project.

For more information, see Runner SaaS.

Sidekiq

GitLab.com runs Sidekiq with arguments --timeout=4 --concurrency=4 and the following environment variables:

NOTE: The SIDEKIQ_MEMORY_KILLER_MAX_RSS setting is 16000000 on Sidekiq import nodes and Sidekiq export nodes.

PostgreSQL

GitLab.com being a fairly large installation of GitLab means we have changed various PostgreSQL settings to better suit our needs. For example, we use streaming replication and servers in hot-standby mode to balance queries across different database servers.

The list of GitLab.com specific settings (and their defaults) is as follows:

Some of these settings are in the process being adjusted. For example, the value for shared_buffers is quite high, and we are considering adjusting it.

Puma

GitLab.com uses the default of 60 seconds for Puma request timeouts.

GitLab.com-specific rate limits

NOTE: See Rate limits for administrator documentation.

When a request is rate limited, GitLab responds with a 429 status code. The client should wait before attempting the request again. There are also informational headers with this response detailed in rate limiting responses.

The following table describes the rate limits for GitLab.com, both before and after the limits change in January, 2021:

More details are available on the rate limits for protected paths and raw endpoints.

GitLab can rate-limit requests at several layers. The rate limits listed here are configured in the application. These limits are the most restrictive per IP address. To learn more about the rate limiting for GitLab.com, read our runbook page Overview of rate limits for GitLab.com.

Rate limiting responses

For information on rate limiting responses, see:

• List of headers on responses to blocked requests.
• Customizable response text.

Protected paths throttle

GitLab.com responds with HTTP status code 429 to POST requests at protected paths that exceed 10 requests per minute per IP address.

See the source below for which paths are protected. This includes user creation, user confirmation, user sign in, and password reset.

User and IP rate limits includes a list of the headers responded to blocked requests.

See Protected Paths for more details.

IP blocks

IP blocks can occur when GitLab.com receives unusual traffic from a single IP address that the system views as potentially malicious. This can be based on rate limit settings. After the unusual traffic ceases, the IP address is automatically released depending on the type of block, as described in a following section.

If you receive a 403 Forbidden error for all requests to GitLab.com, check for any automated processes that may be triggering a block. For assistance, contact GitLab Support with details, such as the affected IP address.

Git and container registry failed authentication ban

GitLab.com responds with HTTP status code 403 for 1 hour, if 30 failed authentication requests were received in a 3-minute period from a single IP address.

This applies only to Git requests and container registry (/jwt/auth) requests (combined).

This limit:

• Is reset by requests that authenticate successfully. For example, 29 failed authentication requests followed by 1 successful request, followed by 29 more failed authentication requests would not trigger a ban.
• Does not apply to JWT requests authenticated by gitlab-ci-token.

No response headers are provided.

Pagination response headers

For performance reasons, if a query returns more than 10,000 records, GitLab excludes some headers.

Visibility settings

If created before GitLab 12.2 (July 2019), these items have the Internal visibility setting disabled on GitLab.com:

• Projects
• Groups
• Snippets

SSH maximum number of connections

GitLab.com defines the maximum number of concurrent, unauthenticated SSH connections by using the MaxStartups setting. If more than the maximum number of allowed connections occur concurrently, they are dropped and users get an ssh_exchange_identification error.

Import/export

To help avoid abuse, project and group imports, exports, and export downloads are rate limited. See Project import/export rate limits and Group import/export rate limits for details.

Non-configurable limits

See non-configurable limits for information on rate limits that are not configurable, and therefore also used on GitLab.com.

GitLab.com logging

We use Fluentd to parse our logs. Fluentd sends our logs to Stackdriver Logging and Cloud Pub/Sub. Stackdriver is used for storing logs long-term in Google Cold Storage (GCS). Cloud Pub/Sub is used to forward logs to an Elastic cluster using pubsubbeat.

You can view more information in our runbooks such as:

• A detailed list of what we're logging
• Our current log retention policies
• A diagram of our logging infrastructure

Job logs

By default, GitLab does not expire job logs. Job logs are retained indefinitely, and can't be configured on GitLab.com to expire. You can erase job logs manually with the Jobs API or by deleting a pipeline.

GitLab.com at scale

In addition to the GitLab Enterprise Edition Omnibus install, GitLab.com uses the following applications and settings to achieve scale. All settings are publicly available at chef cookbooks.

Elastic cluster

We use Elasticsearch and Kibana for part of our monitoring solution:

• gitlab-cookbooks / gitlab-elk · GitLab
• gitlab-cookbooks / gitlab_elasticsearch · GitLab

Fluentd

We use Fluentd to unify our GitLab logs:

• gitlab-cookbooks / gitlab_fluentd · GitLab

Prometheus

Prometheus complete our monitoring stack:

• gitlab-cookbooks / gitlab-prometheus · GitLab

Grafana

For the visualization of monitoring data:

• gitlab-cookbooks / gitlab-grafana · GitLab

Sentry

Open source error tracking:

• gitlab-cookbooks / gitlab-sentry · GitLab

Consul

Service discovery:

• gitlab-cookbooks / gitlab_consul · GitLab

HAProxy

High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer:

• gitlab-cookbooks / gitlab-haproxy · GitLab