Compliance features

Tier: Free, Premium, Ultimate Offering: Self-managed

GitLab compliance features ensure your GitLab instance meets common compliance standards, and are available at various pricing tiers. For more information about compliance management, see the compliance management solutions page.

The security features in GitLab may also help you meet relevant compliance standards.

Policy management

Organizations have unique policy requirements, either due to organizational standards or mandates from regulatory bodies. The following features help you define rules and policies to adhere to workflow requirements, separation of duties, and secure supply chain best practices:

Feature Instances Groups Projects Description
Credentials inventory Yes No No Keep track of the credentials used by all of the users in a GitLab instance.
Granular user roles
and flexible permissions 		Yes Yes Yes Manage access and permissions with five different user roles and settings for external users. Set permissions according to people’s role, rather than either read or write access to a repository. Don’t share the source code with people that only need access to the issue tracker.
Merge request approvals Yes Yes Yes Configure approvals required for merge requests.
Push rules Yes Yes Yes Control pushes to your repositories.
Separation of duties using
protected branches and
custom CI/CD configuration paths 		No No Yes Leverage the GitLab cross-project YAML configurations to define deployers of code and developers of code. See how to use this setup to define these roles in the Separation of Duties deploy project and the Separation of Duties project.
Security policies Yes Yes Yes Configure customizable policies that require merge request approval based on policy rules, or enforce security scanners to execute in project pipelines for compliance requirements. Policies can be enforced granularly against specific projects, or all projects in a group or subgroup.

Compliant workflow automation

It is important for compliance teams to be confident that their controls and requirements are set up correctly, but also that they stay set up correctly. One way of doing this is manually checking settings periodically, but this is error prone and time consuming. A better approach is to use single-source-of-truth settings and automation to ensure that whatever a compliance team has configured, stays configured and working correctly. These features can help you automate compliance:

Feature Instances Groups Projects Description
Compliance frameworks No Yes No Describe the type of compliance requirements projects must follow.
Compliance pipelines No Yes No Define a pipeline configuration to run for any projects with a given compliance framework.
Merge request approval policy approval settings Yes Yes Yes Enforce a merge request approval policy enforcing multiple approvers and override various project settings in all enforced groups or projects across your GitLab instance or group.

Audit management

An important part of any compliance program is being able to go back and understand what happened, when it happened, and who was responsible. You can use this in audit situations as well as for understanding the root cause of issues when they occur.

It is helpful to have both low-level, raw lists of audit data as well as high-level, summary lists of audit data. Between these two, compliance teams can quickly identify if problems exist and then drill down into the specifics of those issues. These features can help provide visibility into GitLab and audit what is happening:

Feature Instances Groups Projects Description
Audit events Yes Yes Yes To maintain the integrity of your code, audit events give administrators the ability to view any modifications made in the GitLab server in an advanced audit events system, so you can control, analyze, and track every change.
Audit reports Yes Yes Yes Create and access reports based on the audit events that have occurred. Use pre-built GitLab reports or the API to build your own.
Auditor users Yes No No Auditor users are users who are given read-only access to all projects, groups, and other resources on the GitLab instance.
Compliance center No Yes Yes Quickly get visibility into the compliance posture of your organization through compliance standards adherence reporting and violations reports. Manage your groups compliance frameworks centrally.

Other compliance features

These features can also help with compliance requirements:

Feature Instances Groups Projects Description
Email all users of a project,
group, or entire server 		Yes No No Email groups of users based on project or group membership, or email everyone using the GitLab instance. These emails are great for scheduled maintenance or upgrades.
Enforce ToS acceptance Yes No No Enforce your users accepting new terms of service by blocking GitLab traffic.
External Status Checks No No Yes Interface with third-party systems you already use during development to ensure you remain compliant.
Generate reports on permission
levels of users 		Yes No No Generate a report listing all users’ access permissions for groups and projects in the instance.
License approval policies No No Yes Search dependencies for their licenses. This lets you determine if the licenses of your project’s dependencies are compatible with your project’s license.
Lock project membership to group No Yes No Group owners can prevent new members from being added to projects in a group.
LDAP group sync Yes No No Automatically synchronize groups and manage SSH keys, permissions, and authentication, so you can focus on building your product, not configuring your tools.
LDAP group sync filters Yes No No Gives more flexibility to synchronize with LDAP based on filters, meaning you can leverage LDAP attributes to map GitLab permissions.
Linux package installations support
log forwarding 		Yes No No Forward your logs to a central system.
Restrict SSH Keys Yes No No Control the technology and key length of SSH keys used to access GitLab.