What Orbit indexes
- Tier: Premium, Ultimate
- Offering: GitLab.com
- Status: Experiment
The availability of this feature is controlled by a feature flag. For more information, see the history. This feature is available for testing, but not ready for production use.
Scope
Orbit indexes top-level groups only. Enable Orbit on a top-level group and all its subgroups and projects are indexed automatically. You cannot enable Orbit on a subgroup or individual project.
SDLC data
Orbit indexes the following GitLab objects and their relationships:
| Domain | Objects indexed |
|---|---|
| Core | Groups, projects, users, notes (comments) |
| Code review | Merge requests, merge request diffs, changed files |
| CI/CD | Pipelines, stages, jobs |
| Planning | Work items (issues, epics, tasks, incidents), milestones, labels |
| Security | Vulnerabilities, security findings, security scans, scanners, CVE/CWE identifiers |
SDLC data is updated continuously via change data capture. Changes in your GitLab instance appear in Orbit within minutes.
Source code
Orbit indexes source code from your repositories and builds a code graph on top of it.
What gets indexed:
- Files and directories
- Function, class, and module definitions (with start/end line and full source content)
- Import and cross-file reference relationships between files
Code is indexed from the default branch only. Orbit re-indexes automatically when the default branch changes.
Supported languages
| Language | Definitions | Cross-file references |
|---|---|---|
| Ruby | Yes | Yes |
| Java | Yes | Yes |
| Kotlin | Yes | Yes |
| Python | Yes | Yes |
| TypeScript | Yes | Yes |
| JavaScript | Yes | Yes |
| Rust | Yes | Yes |
| Go | Yes | Yes |
| C# | Yes | Yes |
| C | Yes | Yes |
| C++ | Yes | Yes |
Languages not currently indexed: Swift, COBOL, Terraform, YAML.
What is not indexed
- Branches other than the default branch
- Binary files
- Files in archived projects (SDLC metadata for archived projects is still indexed)
- Private content the requesting user does not have access to (authorization is enforced at query time)
Authorization
Orbit enforces GitLab access controls at query time. A query returns only entities the requesting user has access to in GitLab. There is no separate Orbit permission model.
A group Owner who enables Orbit does not grant other users broader access than they already have in GitLab.