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GitLab provider for Terraform

Terraform, the almost universal "* as a code" tool from Hashicorp, which inspired this app (hence the name!), has a provider for configuring GitLab using the Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL).

It is an older and more mature solution than GitLabForm, using a de-facto standard configuration language, but it's also more generic.

GitLabForm has been built specifically for managing GitLab and has been designed around different concepts that provide a different set of features, arguably a more powerful one.

Key differences

...between GitLab provider for Terraform ("GT") and GitLabForm ("GLF"):

  • GT allows creating resources such as users, groups and projects while GLF (as of now) allows only configuring existing entities (with an exception for management of files in the repo, which is a unique GLF feature),

  • GT can only manage specific groups and projects. GLF allows configuring everything it supports for ALL of your projects in your GitLab instance (with the possibility to provide more specialized configuration for some of the groups and projects).

  • GT is using a structured language which describes each managed resource explicitly (with iterators, of course) while GLF is based on YAML and a concept of hierarchical, inheritable configuration with merging/overwriting and addivity. Therefore only with GLF you can write configs like "For all projects in group X do this, but for specific projects X/A and X/B in it also do this and for X/C do something a bit different".

  • GT wraps the GitLab API into abstractions while GLF in many cases (explained in the docs) makes PUT/POST requests of the dicts found in the config as-is to the GitLab API. GT approach is more convenient and less "raw" (you read GT docs when using it, while for GLF you also have to read GitLab API docs) but GLF allows you to use all of the GitLab API features - GT supports only a fraction of GitLab's API parameters for editing group and project while GLF by design allows you to use all of them. Also when you update your GitLab instance you can start using new API features immediately with GLF while with GT you have to wait until its new version supporting those features is released.

Feature matrix/comparison sheet

For your convenience we have prepared GitLab provider for Terraform vs GitLabForm feature matrix / comparion sheet. Note: this sheet MAY contain errors and WILL get outdated. Please report these issues in it using comments. Thank you!

GitLab Configuration as Code (GCasC)

Since v3.10.0 you can configure the GitLab's application settings too with GitLabForm.

For possibly more instance-wide settings of GitLab (like appearance, features, license, etc.) you can also check out the GitLab Configuration as Code (GCasC) project.

(Although as of May 2024 it looks a bit stale.)