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Snippets

With GitLab Snippets you can store and share bits of code and text with other users.

GitLab Snippet

There are 2 types of snippets, personal snippets and project snippets.

Personal snippets

Personal snippets are not related to any project and can be created completely independently. There are 3 visibility levels that can be set, public, internal and private. See Public access for more information.

Project snippets

Project snippets are always related to a specific project. See Project's features for more information.

Discover snippets

There are two main ways of how you can discover snippets in GitLab.

For exploring all snippets that are visible to you, you can go to the Snippets dashboard of your GitLab instance via the top navigation. For GitLab.com you can find it here. This navigates you to an overview that shows snippets you created and allows you to explore all snippets.

If you want to discover snippets that belong to a specific project, you can navigate to the Snippets page via the left side navigation on the project page.

Snippet comments

Introduced in GitLab 9.2.

With GitLab Snippets you engage in a conversation about that piece of code, facilitating the collaboration among users.

Downloading snippets

You can download the raw content of a snippet.

By default snippets will be downloaded with Linux-style line endings (LF). If you want to preserve the original line endings you need to add a parameter line_ending=raw (e.g., https://gitlab.com/snippets/SNIPPET_ID/raw?line_ending=raw). In case a snippet was created using the GitLab web interface the original line ending is Windows-like (CRLF).

Embedded snippets

Introduced in GitLab 10.8.

Public snippets can not only be shared, but also embedded on any website. This allows to reuse a GitLab snippet in multiple places and any change to the source is automatically reflected in the embedded snippet.

To embed a snippet, first make sure that:

  • The project is public (if it's a project snippet)
  • The snippet is public
  • In Project > Settings > Permissions, the snippets permissions are set to Everyone with access

Once the above conditions are met, the "Embed" section will appear in your snippet where you can simply click on the "Copy to clipboard" button. This copies a one-line script that you can add to any website or blog post.

Here's how an example code looks like:

<script src="https://gitlab.com/namespace/project/snippets/SNIPPET_ID.js"></script>

Here's how an embedded snippet looks like:

Embedded snippets are displayed with a header that shows the file name if defined, the snippet size, a link to GitLab, and the actual snippet content. Actions in the header allow users to see the snippet in raw format and download it.