GitLab 18.1 Released: Smarter DevSecOps and AI-Powered Development

What’s New in GitLab 18.1: Accelerating DevSecOps Efficiency and Collaboration

GitLab 18.1 is now live, delivering a new array of innovations designed to help teams develop, secure, and operate software more effectively. This release features powerful enhancements in code security, AI-driven development, and streamlined collaboration, all in line with GitLab’s direction towards a unified DevSecOps platform.

Code Suggestions Enhanced with Contextual Awareness

AI-powered Code Suggestions now support contextual understanding using surrounding code. While still experimental, this update allows the AI assistant to generate more accurate code completions by leveraging larger sections of your codebase. To activate this, repositories must contain over 2 KB of content and use accepted languages such as JavaScript and Python. This uptake brings faster coding and reduced context switching.

Single Step Merge Requests for Seamless Contributions

The new single-step merge request workflow simplifies the contribution process. Developers can now create new files and raise merge requests from the Web IDE without pushing branches locally. This accelerates collaboration and reduces Git overhead, especially useful for docs and minor code changes.

Reusable Configuration in CI/CD Templates

GitLab 18.1 introduces a huge quality-of-life improvement for CI/CD by enabling reference-based inclusion of pipeline templates. Instead of duplicating complex configurations, teams can now reuse and maintain versioned CI/CD templates via GitLab’s include keyword. This promotes template sharing for consistent and efficient pipelines across projects.

Greater Control Over Compliance and Audit

Compliance workflows gain new levels of transparency with automated approval support for overridden scans. When overrides are made to critical scan configurations, GitLab now allows enforcement and audit tracking, an essential feature for highly regulated industries.

Monitoring Standalone Projects within Groups

Project-level dashboards are now more scalable, enabling you to view and drill down metrics from group-level observability across standalone projects. This makes it easier to assess health indicators and error rates without needing manual project switching.

Platform Direction and Deprecations

This release also comes with important deprecations, including ongoing phasing out of Geo configurations for older PostgreSQL versions, and removal of deprecated GraphQL fields and REST APIs. Teams are advised to review these changes to ensure compatibility.

To explore the full release notes of GitLab 18.1, visit the official GitLab blog.

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