Store all of your packages in one GitLab project

Tier: Free, Premium, Ultimate Offering: GitLab.com, Self-managed, GitLab Dedicated

You can store all of your packages in one project’s package registry. Rather than using a GitLab repository to store code, you can use the repository to store all your packages. Then you can configure your remote repositories to point to the project in GitLab.

You might want to do this because:

  • You want to publish your packages in GitLab, but to a different project from where your code is stored.
  • You want to group packages together in one project. For example, you might want to put all npm packages, or all packages for a specific department, or all private packages in the same project.
  • When you install packages for other projects, you want to use one remote.
  • You want to migrate your packages from a third-party package registry to a single place in GitLab and do not want to worry about setting up separate projects for each package.
  • You want to have your CI/CD pipelines build all of your packages to one project, so the person responsible for validating packages can manage them all in one place.

Example walkthrough

No functionality is specific to this feature. Instead, we’re taking advantage of the functionality of each package management system to publish different package types to the same place.

Store different package types in one GitLab project

Let’s take a look at how you might create one project to host all of your packages:

  1. Create a new project in GitLab. The project doesn’t require any code or content.
  2. On the left sidebar, select Project overview, and note the project ID.

  3. Create an access token for authentication. All package types in the package registry can be published by using:

    If the project is private, downloading packages requires authentication as well.

  4. Configure your local project and publish the package.

You can upload all types of packages to the same project, or split things up based on package type or package visibility level.

npm

If you’re using npm, create an .npmrc file. Add the appropriate URL for publishing packages to your project. Finally, add a section to your package.json file.

Follow the instructions in the GitLab package registry npm documentation. After you do this, you can publish your npm package to your project using npm publish, as described in the publishing packages section.

Maven

If you are using Maven, you update your pom.xml file with distribution sections. These updates include the appropriate URL for your project, as described in the GitLab Maven Repository documentation. Then, you need to add a settings.xml file and include your access token. Now you can publish Maven packages to your project.

Conan

For Conan, you need to add GitLab as a Conan registry remote. Follow the instructions in the GitLab Conan Repository docs. Then, create your package using the plus-separated (+) project path as your Conan user. For example, if your project is located at https://gitlab.com/foo/bar/my-proj, create your Conan package using conan create . foo+bar+my-proj/channel. channel is your package channel (such as stable or beta).

After you create your package, you’re ready to publish your package, depending on your final package recipe. For example: 

CONAN_LOGIN_USERNAME=<gitlab-username> CONAN_PASSWORD=<personal_access_token> conan upload MyPackage/1.0.0@foo+bar+my-proj/channel --all --remote=gitlab

Composer

You can’t publish a Composer package outside of its project. An issue exists to implement functionality that allows you to publish such packages to other projects.

All other package types

All package types supported by GitLab can be published in the same GitLab project. In previous releases, not all package types could be published in the same project.