Compliance features

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:

FeatureInstancesGroupsProjectsDescription
Credentials inventory Yes No NoKeep track of the credentials used by all of the users in a GitLab instance.
Granular user roles
and flexible permissions
Yes Yes YesManage 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 YesConfigure approvals required for merge requests.
Push rules Yes Yes YesControl pushes to your repositories.
Separation of duties using
protected branches and
custom CI/CD configuration paths
No No YesLeverage 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.

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:

FeatureInstancesGroupsProjectsDescription
Compliance frameworks No Yes NoDescribe the type of compliance requirements projects must follow.
Compliance pipelines No Yes NoDefine a pipeline configuration to run for any projects with a given compliance framework.

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:

FeatureInstancesGroupsProjectsDescription
Audit events Yes Yes YesTo 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 YesCreate 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 NoAuditor users are users who are given read-only access to all projects, groups, and other resources on the GitLab instance.
Compliance center No Yes NoQuickly get visibility into the compliance posture of your organization.

Other compliance features

These features can also help with compliance requirements:

FeatureInstancesGroupsProjectsDescription
Email all users of a project,
group, or entire server
Yes No NoEmail 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 NoEnforce your users accepting new terms of service by blocking GitLab traffic.
External Status Checks No No YesInterface with third-party systems you already use during development to ensure you remain compliant.
Generate reports on permission
levels of users
Yes No NoGenerate a report listing all users’ access permissions for groups and projects in the instance.
License approval policies No No YesSearch 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 NoGroup owners can prevent new members from being added to projects in a group.
LDAP group sync Yes No NoAutomatically 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 NoGives 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 NoForward your logs to a central system.
Restrict SSH Keys Yes No NoControl the technology and key length of SSH keys used to access GitLab.