Tutorial: Set up your organization

  • Tier: Free, Premium, Ultimate
  • Offering: GitLab Self-Managed

This tutorial will teach you how to set up and manage your company’s GitLab organization by:

  • Creating groups, subgroups, and projects
  • Assigning different roles to group members in these groups, subgroups, and projects

In this tutorial, you are the IT administrator of a small software company. This company uses GitLab and is divided into marketing, sales, and development divisions.

You have already set up the marketing and sales organizations. In this tutorial, you will set up the software development organization. This organization has the following permanent employees:

  • One IT administrator: You.
  • One product manager: Alex Smith.
  • One engineering manager: Blake Wang.
  • Three software developers: Charlie Devi, Devon Ivanov, and Evan Kim.
  • One UX designer: Frankie Ali.
  • One technical writer: Grayson Garcia.
  • One contractor content strategist: Hunter Silva.

You’re going to create:

  • The software development organization.
  • Groups, subgroups, and projects to manage work.
  • Users to add to the groups and projects and assign roles to those users.
  • A project in the organization for a specific piece of work, and add users to that project.

Before you begin

  • Make sure you have administrator access to GitLab Self-Managed.

Create the organization parent group and subgroups

First, you’ll create a group called Development. The Development group will serve as the parent group for the whole software development organization.

To create the Development group:

  1. Open GitLab Self-Managed.
  2. In the upper-right corner, select Create new ( plus ) and New group.
  3. Select Create group.
  4. In Group name, enter Development.
  5. Under Group URL, enter development-group. You’ll see a message saying “Group path is available”. The group URL is used for the namespace. A namespace provides a place to organize your related projects.
  6. Under Visibility level, select Private. This way, any subgroups of this group must be private as well.
  7. Under Who will be using this group?, select My company or team.
  8. In the What will you use this group for? dropdown list, select I want to store my code.
  9. Do not invite any GitLab members or other users to join the group yet.
  10. Select Create group.

You have created the parent group for your organization. Next, you will create subgroups.

Create the organization subgroups

For this tutorial, we assume that Development is organized into the following working areas:

  • Product Management
  • Engineering
  • User Experience
    • UX Design
    • Technical Writing

Now, you will create subgroups to reflect this organization structure.

Subgroups and projects must have visibility settings that are at least as restrictive as the visibility setting of their parent group. For example, you cannot have a private parent group and a public subgroup.

To create your organization subgroups:

  1. In the top bar, select Search or go to.
  2. Select View all my groups.