GitLab has hit the big 11.10 with its eponymous DevOps lifecycle tool, with the addition of pipeline statuses on the Ops dashboard at the top of a long ladder of new features.

The addition of pipeline status to the Operations Dashboard means teams can “view the pipeline health of all the projects they care about, together in a single interface”. The vendor said the feature should be “especially valuable when using multi-project pipelines – common when you have a microservices architecture and you need to run a pipeline to test and deploy code housed in multiple different project repositories.” What happens to the projects you don’t care about isn’t noted.

Sticking with pipelines, GitLab seeks to prevent pipeline failures in situations where feature and target branches have drifted apart. As GitLab puts it, “this can result in a situation where both the source and target branch’s pipelines are green and there are no merge conflicts, but the combined output will result in a failed pipeline due to an incompatibility between the changes.”

GitLab’s answer is to allow you to “run pipelines against the merged result prior to merging” which should allow you to “quickly catch errors that would only surface if you had rebased often.”

A raft of smaller changes and additions are also included. Back in December GitLab introduced merge request suggestions, “allowing a reviewer to suggest a one-line change in a merge request comment that can be readily committed from within the comment thread interface.” This appears to have gone down well, and the logical next step would be to introduce multi-line changes, which is just what it has delivered in 11.10.

Other improvements include changes to Container Registry cleanup, to free up storage space which has become clogged with iterative revisions pushed to the same tag. Historical revisions can be wiped out using the -m parameter with registry-garbage-collect.

Users on GitLab’s paid plans can now purchase additional CI Runner minutes. Previously, once users had used up the quota on their plan, they ran the risk of pipelines running to a halt. 1,000 minutes will cost you $8, and unused minutes roll over at the end of the month.

Full details of these features, and other changes with 10.11 are on the GitLab website here.