• Principles behind permissions
• Instance-wide user permissions
• Project members permissions
• Project features permissions
  • GitLab CI/CD permissions
    • Job permissions
  • Wiki and issues
  • Protected branches
  • Value stream analytics permissions
  • Issue board permissions
  • File Locking permissions
  • Confidential Issues permissions
  • Container Registry visibility permissions
• Group members permissions
  • Subgroup permissions
• External users
  • Setting new users to external
• Free Guest users
• Auditor users
• Users with minimal access
  • Minimal access users take license seats
• Project features
• Release permissions with protected tags
• LDAP users permissions
• Project aliases

Permissions and roles

Users have different abilities depending on the role they have in a particular group or project. If a user is both in a project’s group and the project itself, the highest role is used.

On public and internal projects, the Guest role (not to be confused with Guest user) is not enforced.

When a member leaves a team’s project, all the assigned issues and merge requests are automatically unassigned.

GitLab administrators receive all permissions.

To add or import a user, you can follow the project members documentation.

Principles behind permissions

See our product handbook on permissions.

Instance-wide user permissions

By default, users can create top-level groups and change their usernames. A GitLab administrator can configure the GitLab instance to modify this behavior.

Project members permissions

• Introduced in GitLab 14.8, personal namespace owners appear with Owner role in new projects in their namespace. Introduced with a flag named personal_project_owner_with_owner_access. Disabled by default.
• Generally available in GitLab 14.9. Feature flag personal_project_owner_with_owner_access removed.

A user’s role determines what permissions they have on a project. The Owner role provides all permissions but is available only:

• For group owners. The role is inherited for a group’s projects.
• For Administrators.

Personal namespace owners:

• Are displayed as having the Maintainer role on projects in the namespace, but have the same permissions as a user with the Owner role.
• In GitLab 14.9 and later, for new projects in the namespace, are displayed as having the Owner role.

For more information about how to manage project members, see members of a project.

The following table lists project permissions available for each role:

1. On self-managed GitLab instances, guest users are able to perform this action only on public and internal projects (not on private projects). External users must be given explicit access even if the project is internal. For GitLab.com, see the GitLab.com visibility settings.
2. Guest users can only view the confidential issues they created themselves.
3. Not allowed for Guest, Reporter, Developer, Maintainer, or Owner. See protected branches.
4. If the branch is protected, this depends on the access Developers and Maintainers are given.
5. Guest users can access GitLab Releases for downloading assets but are not allowed to download the source code nor see repository information like commits and release evidence.
6. Actions are limited only to records owned (referenced) by user.
7. When Share Group Lock is enabled the project can’t be shared with other groups. It does not affect group with group sharing.
8. For information on eligible approvers for merge requests, see Eligible approvers.
9. Applies only to comments on Design Management designs.
10. Users can only view events based on their individual actions.
11. Project access tokens are supported for self-managed instances on Free and above. They are also supported on GitLab SaaS Premium and above (excluding trial licenses).
12. If the tag is protected, this depends on the access Developers and Maintainers are given.
13. A Maintainer can’t change project features visibility level if project visibility is set to private.
14. Attached design files are moved together with the issue even if the user doesn’t have the Developer role.
15. Guest users can only set metadata (for example, labels, assignees, or milestones) when creating an issue. They cannot change the metadata on existing issues.
16. In GitLab 14.5 or later, Guests are not allowed to create incidents. A guest who created an incident when they had the Reporter role or who is assigned to the incident can modify the title, description and metrics. They can also close and reopen the incident.
17. In projects that accept contributions from external members, users can create, edit, and close their own merge requests.
18. Authors and assignees of issues can modify the title and description even if they don’t have the Reporter role.
19. Authors and assignees can close and reopen issues even if they don’t have the Reporter role.
20. The ability to view the Container Registry and pull images is controlled by the Container Registry’s visibility permissions.

Project features permissions

More details about the permissions for some project-level features follow.

GitLab CI/CD permissions

GitLab CI/CD permissions for some roles can be modified by these settings:

• Public pipelines: When set to public, gives access to certain CI/CD features to Guest project members.
• Pipeline visibility: When set to Everyone with Access, gives access to certain CI/CD “view” features to non-project members.

1. If the project is public and Public pipelines is enabled in Project Settings > CI/CD.
2. If Public pipelines is enabled in Project Settings > CI/CD.
3. If the project is public.
4. Only if the job was both:
   • Triggered by the user.
   • In GitLab 13.0 and later, run for a non-protected branch.
5. If the user is allowed to merge or push to the protected branch.

Job permissions

This table shows granted privileges for jobs triggered by specific types of users:

1. Only if the triggering user is not an external one.
2. Only if the triggering user is a member of the project.

Wiki and issues

Project features like wikis and issues can be hidden from users depending on which visibility level you select on project settings.

• Disabled: disabled for everyone
• Only team members: only team members can see even if your project is public or internal
• Everyone with access: everyone can see depending on your project’s visibility level
• Everyone: enabled for everyone (only available for GitLab Pages)

Protected branches

Additional restrictions can be applied on a per-branch basis with protected branches. Additionally, you can customize permissions to allow or prevent project Maintainers and Developers from pushing to a protected branch. Read through the documentation on protected branches to learn more.

Value stream analytics permissions

Find the current permissions on the value stream analytics dashboard, as described in related documentation.

Issue board permissions

Find the current permissions for interacting with the issue board feature in the issue boards permissions page.

File Locking permissions

The user that locks a file or directory is the only one that can edit and push their changes back to the repository where the locked objects are located.

Read through the documentation on permissions for File Locking to learn more.

Confidential Issues permissions

Confidential issues can be accessed by users with reporter and higher permission levels, as well as by guest users that create a confidential issue. To learn more, read through the documentation on permissions and access to confidential issues.

Container Registry visibility permissions

The ability to view the Container Registry and pull images is controlled by the Container Registry’s visibility permissions. Find these permissions for the Container Registry as described in the related documentation.

Group members permissions

Any user can remove themselves from a group, unless they are the last Owner of the group.

The following table lists group permissions available for each role:

1. Groups can be set to allow either Owners, or Owners and users with the Maintainer role, to create subgroups.
2. Introduced in GitLab 12.2.
3. Default project creation role can be changed at:
   • The instance level.
   • The group level.
4. Does not apply to subgroups.
5. Developers can push commits to the default branch of a new project only if the default branch protection is set to “Partially protected” or “Not protected”.
6. In addition, if your group is public or internal, all users who can see the group can also see group wiki pages.
7. Users can only view events based on their individual actions.

Subgroup permissions

When you add a member to a subgroup, they inherit the membership and permission level from the parent group(s). This model allows access to nested groups if you have membership in one of its parents.

To learn more, read through the documentation on subgroups memberships.

External users

In cases where it is desired that a user has access only to some internal or private projects, there is the option of creating External Users. This feature may be useful when for example a contractor is working on a given project and should only have access to that project.

External users:

• Can only create projects (including forks), subgroups, and snippets within the top-level group to which they belong.
• Can only access public projects and projects to which they are explicitly granted access, thus hiding all other internal or private ones from them (like being logged out).
• Can only access public groups and groups to which they are explicitly granted access, thus hiding all other internal or private ones from them (like being logged out).
• Can only access public snippets.

Access can be granted by adding the user as member to the project or group. Like usual users, they receive a role in the project or group with all the abilities that are mentioned in the permissions table above. For example, if an external user is added as Guest, and your project is internal or private, they do not have access to the code; you need to grant the external user access at the Reporter level or above if you want them to have access to the code. You should always take into account the project’s visibility and permissions settings as well as the permission level of the user.

An administrator can flag a user as external by either of the following methods:

• Through the API.
• Using the GitLab UI:
  1. On the top bar, select Menu > Admin.
  2. On the left sidebar, select Overview > Users to create a new user or edit an existing one. There, you can find the option to flag the user as external.

Additionally, users can be set as external users using:

• SAML groups.
• LDAP groups.

Setting new users to external

By default, new users are not set as external users. This behavior can be changed by an administrator:

1. On the top bar, select Menu > Admin.
2. On the left sidebar, select Settings > General.
3. Expand the Account and limit section.

If you change the default behavior of creating new users as external, you have the option to narrow it down by defining a set of internal users. The Internal users field allows specifying an email address regex pattern to identify default internal users. New users whose email address matches the regex pattern are set to internal by default rather than an external collaborator.

The regex pattern format is in Ruby, but it needs to be convertible to JavaScript, and the ignore case flag is set (/regex pattern/i). Here are some examples:

• Use \.internal@domain\.com$ to mark email addresses ending with .internal@domain.com as internal.
• Use ^(?:(?!\.ext@domain\.com).)*$\r? to mark users with email addresses NOT including .ext@domain.com as internal.

Free Guest users

When a user is given the Guest role on a project, group, or both, and holds no higher permission level on any other project or group on the GitLab instance, the user is considered a guest user by GitLab and does not consume a license seat. There is no other specific “guest” designation for newly created users.

If the user is assigned a higher role on any projects or groups, the user takes a license seat. If a user creates a project, the user becomes a Maintainer on the project, resulting in the use of a license seat. Also, note that if your project is internal or private, Guest users have all the abilities that are mentioned in the permissions table above (they are unable to browse the project’s repository, for example).

Auditor users

Auditor users are given read-only access to all projects, groups, and other resources on the GitLab instance.

An Auditor user should be able to access all projects and groups of a GitLab instance with the permissions described on the documentation on auditor users permissions.

Read more about Auditor users.

Users with minimal access

Owners can add members with a “minimal access” role to a parent group. Such users don’t automatically have access to projects and subgroups underneath. Owners must explicitly add these “minimal access” users to the specific subgroups and projects.

Because of an outstanding issue, when minimal access users:

• Sign in with standard web authentication, they receive a 404 error when accessing the parent group.
• Sign in with Group SSO, they receive a 404 error immediately because they are redirected to the parent group page.

To work around the issue, give these users the Guest role or higher to any project or subgroup within the parent group.

Minimal access users take license seats

Users with even a “minimal access” role are counted against your number of license seats. This requirement does not apply for GitLab Ultimate subscriptions.

Project features

Project features like wiki and issues can be hidden from users depending on which visibility level you select on project settings.

• Disabled: disabled for everyone.
• Only team members: only team members can see, even if your project is public or internal.
• Everyone with access: everyone can see depending on your project visibility level.
• Everyone: enabled for everyone (only available for GitLab Pages).

Release permissions with protected tags

The permission to create tags is used to define if a user can create, edit, and delete Releases.

See Release permissions for more information.

LDAP users permissions

LDAP user permissions can be manually overridden by an administrator. Read through the documentation on LDAP users permissions to learn more.

Project aliases

Project aliases can only be read, created and deleted by a GitLab administrator. Read through the documentation on Project aliases to learn more.