GitLab 14.6 is now ready for downloading. With its last release of 2021, the GitLab team tried to improve things for widely distributed teams by reworking mirroring component Geo. 

While users of self-managed instances had to know the URL of the site replica closest to them in order to get the best performance before, the updated version knows the concept of unified URLs. Through its introduction, everyone in an organisation can now use the same URL and Geo will automatically choose the closest site. 

Geo now also comes with secondary proxying, meaning write requests will be proxied to the primary site when working on a replique. Before, users had to change sites in order to perform changes.

To help Ultimate subscribers get a full understanding of their project’s dependencies, container scanning jobs have been modified to add “any identified system dependencies to the dependency list by default”. The result can be viewed on the Dependency List page under Security & Compliance. 

Additional security features include SAST scan execution policies to run regular SAST scans independent of the .gitlab-ci.yml file’s contents, an option to set a maximum SSH key lifetime on self-managed ultimate instances, and the ability to compose custom rulesets from multiple sources.

Though the above enhancements are only available to paying customers, GitLab 14.6 comes with an array of improvements for all users. Amongst other things, there’s an activity list for the GitLab agent that logs connections and token statuses, job failure reasons are returned from the Jobs API, and webhooks trigger events when a job state changes to pending.

Users who have cursed that fact that they had to save changes before switching from the raw Markdown editor to the WYSIWYG interface, will be happy to read that they can skip that step in v14.6. The update also includes a “copy to clipboard”-button as a quicker option for copying Markdown code blocks.

Administrators gained features to clean up leftover Kubernetes Runner pods and configure a GitLab CI/CD job using when as well as rules. Starting with 14.6, they can also move subgroups to a different parent via the API (before, this only worked via the UI), customise the default squash commit message, and use deploy tokens to authenticate those interacting with the Composer repository. 

GitLab SAST meanwhile learned to automatically detect .NET 6 projects. Admins however have to pin their .gitlab-ci.yml file to the new major version of Security Code Scan for the .NET 6 scanning to work.