Public access

GitLab allows you to change your projects' visibility in order be accessed publicly or internally.

Projects with either of these visibility levels will be listed in the public access directory (/public under your GitLab instance). Here is the GitLab.com example.

Internal projects will only be available to authenticated users.

Visibility of projects

Public projects

Public projects can be cloned without any authentication.

They will also be listed on the public access directory (/public).

Any logged in user will have Guest permissions on the repository.

Internal projects

Internal projects can be cloned by any logged in user.

They will also be listed on the public access directory (/public) for logged in users.

Any logged in user will have Guest permissions on the repository.

How to change project visibility

1. Go to your project's Settings
2. Change "Visibility Level" to either Public, Internal or Private

Visibility of users

The public page of a user, located at /u/username, is always visible whether you are logged in or not.

When visiting the public page of a user, you can only see the projects which you are privileged to.

Visibility of groups

The public page of a group, located at /groups/groupname, is always visible to everyone.

Logged out users will be able to see the description and the avatar of the group as well as all public projects belonging to that group.

Restricting the use of public or internal projects

In the Admin area under Settings (/admin/application_settings), you can restrict the use of visibility levels for users when they create a project or a snippet. This is useful to prevent people exposing their repositories to public by accident. The restricted visibility settings do not apply to admin users.