User account

When signed into their GitLab account, users can customize their experience according to the best approach to their cases.

Signing in

There are several ways to sign into your GitLab account. See the authentication topic for more details.

User profile

Your profile is available from the up-right corner menu bar (user's avatar) > Profile, or from https://example.gitlab.com/username.

On your profile page, you will see the following information:

• Personal information
• Activity stream: see your activity streamline and the history of your contributions
• Groups: groups you're a member of
• Contributed projects: projects you contributed to
• Personal projects: your personal projects (respecting the project's visibility level)
• Snippets: your personal code snippets

Profile settings

You can edit your account settings by navigating from the up-right corner menu bar (user's avatar) > Settings, or visiting https://example.gitlab.com/profile.

From there, you can:

• Update your personal information
• Set a custom status for your profile
• Manage your commit email for your profile
• Manage 2FA
• Change your username and delete your account
• Manage applications that can use GitLab as an OAuth provider
• Manage personal access tokens to access your account via API and authorized applications
• Add and delete emails linked to your account
• Choose which email to use for notifications, web-based commits, and display on your public profile
• Manage SSH keys to access your account via SSH
• Manage your preferences to customize your own GitLab experience
• View your active sessions and revoke any of them if necessary
• Access your audit log, a security log of important events involving your account

Changing your username

Your username is a unique namespace related to your user ID. Changing it can have unintended side effects, read how redirects will behave before proceeding.

To change your username:

1. Navigate to your profile's Settings > Account.
2. Enter a new username under "Change username".
3. Hit Update username.

CAUTION: Caution: It is currently not possible to change your username if it contains a project with Container Registry tags, because the project cannot be moved.

TIP: Tip: If you want to retain ownership over the original namespace and protect the URL redirects, then instead of changing a group's path or renaming a username, you can create a new group and transfer projects to it. Alternatively, you can follow this detailed procedure from the GitLab Team Handbook which also covers the case where you have projects hosted with GitLab Pages.

Private profile

The following information will be hidden from the user profile page (https://gitlab.example.com/username) if this feature is enabled:

• Atom feed
• Date when account is created
• Activity tab
• Groups tab
• Contributed projects tab
• Personal projects tab
• Snippets tab

To enable private profile:

1. Navigate to your personal profile settings.
2. Check the "Private profile" option.
3. Hit Update profile settings.

NOTE: Note: You and GitLab admins can see your the abovementioned information on your profile even if it is private.

Private contributions

Introduced in GitLab 11.3.

Enabling private contributions will include contributions to private projects, in the user contribution calendar graph and user recent activity.

To enable private contributions:

1. Navigate to your personal profile settings.
2. Check the "Private contributions" option.
3. Hit Update profile settings.

Current status

Introduced in GitLab 11.2.

You can provide a custom status message for your user profile along with an emoji that describes it. This may be helpful when you are out of office or otherwise not available. Other users can then take your status into consideration when responding to your issues or assigning work to you. Please be aware that your status is publicly visible even if your profile is private.

To set your current status:

1. Open the user menu in the top-right corner of the navigation bar.
2. Hit Set status, or Edit status if you have already set a status.
3. Set the emoji and/or status message to your liking.
4. Hit Set status. Alternatively, you can also hit Remove status to remove your user status entirely.

or

1. Navigate to your personal profile settings.
2. In the text field below Your status, enter your status message.
3. Select an emoji from the dropdown if you like.
4. Hit Update profile settings.

Status messages are restricted to 100 characters of plain text. They may however contain emoji codes such as I'm on vacation :palm_tree:.

You can also set your current status using the API.

Commit email

Introduced in GitLab 11.4.

A commit email, is the email that will be displayed in every Git-related action done through the GitLab interface.

You are able to select from the list of your own verified emails which email you want to use as the commit email.

To change it:

1. Open the user menu in the top-right corner of the navigation bar.
2. Hit Commit email selection box.
3. Select any of the verified emails.
4. Hit Update profile settings.

Private commit email

Introduced in GitLab 11.5.

GitLab provides the user with an automatically generated private commit email option, which allows the user to not make their email information public.

To enable this option:

1. Open the user menu in the top-right corner of the navigation bar.
2. Hit Commit email selection box.
3. Select Use a private email option.
4. Hit Update profile settings.

Once this option is enabled, every Git-related action will be performed using the private commit email.

In order to stay fully annonymous, you can also copy this private commit email and configure it on your local machine using the following command:

git config --global user.email "YOUR_PRIVATE_COMMIT_EMAIL"

Troubleshooting

Why do I keep getting signed out?

When signing in to the main GitLab application, a _gitlab_session cookie is set. _gitlab_session is cleared client-side when you close your browser and expires after "Application settings -> Session duration (minutes)"/session_expire_delay (defaults to 10080 minutes = 7 days).

When signing in to the main GitLab application, you can also check the "Remember me" option which sets the remember_user_token cookie (via devise). remember_user_token expires after config/initializers/devise.rb -> config.remember_for (defaults to 2 weeks).

When the _gitlab_session expires or isn't available, GitLab uses the remember_user_token to get you a new _gitlab_session and keep you signed in through browser restarts.

After your remember_user_token expires and your _gitlab_session is cleared/expired, you will be asked to sign in again to verify your identity (which is for security reasons).