Before you create your first project, it’s worth taking a quick look at the three concepts you’ll work with every day.
Organizations and projects
- An organization is the home for your team: members, billing, and shared credentials (servers, email, app stores) live here.
- A project is one product inside the organization – e.g. an app with a backend and a homepage. For each project, the platform generates several repositories in GitLab.
- Roles: administrators manage the organization, projects, and credentials; developers work on the projects assigned to them. Details in Manage your organization.
Two ways of working
You decide per person and situation where development happens – both can also be mixed:
| Locally on your machine | Remote workspace | |
|---|---|---|
| Setup | The setup app installs all tools and clones your projects | Ready-made Ubuntu VM in the cloud, created with one click |
| Access | Directly on your device | Remote desktop (RDP) or VS Code in the browser |
| Good for | Day-to-day work on your own device | Quick start without setup, weak hardware, temporary helpers |
| Get started | Working locally | Working with a remote workspace |
You work identically in both environments: open the repository, start the application with ap run-local, commit, and push.
From code to server
You don’t have to set up deployment – it comes with every project:
- You develop on a feature branch and merge into
mainvia merge request. - The pipeline builds your application and rolls it out to the dev server automatically.
- You release production with one click.
The complete flow is described in Git workflow & deployment.