Technical Note - GitLab external accounts

Summary

ECS GitLab is not public and requires accounts to be set up for it. Invites from within GitLab will not work. External users to ECS/SMS can get GitLab accounts on request.

Details

To request a user access, please send a email to jobs@ecs.vuw.ac.nz with the following information.
Students should CC their supervisors as their approval is needed.

Who/What is it for? Yourself, Course related project or something else.
First & Last name
Email address
Optionally a Preferred username
Access End date or how long access is required for.

If they are a current VUW staff member/student, please tell us. If you can, give us there VUW username. This makes it easier for them as we can set it up, so they use their VUW accounts to login.

It's also good to know if they used to be a student or staff member. We can often use their old username or in the case of previous ECS students can often just re-enable their account.

Preferred username, given they don't have a previous association with us or it was a long time ago we can try to give them their preferred username. It can only be lowercase ASCII alphanumeric characters with no punctuation. E.g. a-z,0-9. There is no guarantee we can give it too them, as it may be already taken.

We will come up with a username made up of their first & last name if we still don't have a valid username.

Expiry dates, for external users we normally only give access for a maximum of a year. This can always be extended before it expires if onward going access is needed.

Important. Accounts set up, are set as external accounts. This means a user can only see groups & projects they are given access to. They can't create groups or projects of their own.

Lastly we hold an academic license for GitLab, thus we can't use it for commercial only purposes. This is a judgment call, but I suspect everything we do would come under academic usage. Also it is not an open license we have a limited number of users.