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Package registry

DETAILS: Tier: Free, Premium, Ultimate Offering: GitLab.com, Self-managed, GitLab Dedicated

  • Moved from GitLab Premium to GitLab Free in 13.3.

With the GitLab package registry, you can use GitLab as a private or public registry for a variety of supported package managers. You can publish and share packages, which can be consumed as a dependency in downstream projects.

Package workflows

Learn how to use the GitLab package registry to build your own custom package workflow:

View packages

You can view packages for your project or group.

  1. Go to the project or group.
  2. Go to Deploy > Package Registry.

You can search, sort, and filter packages on this page. You can share your search results by copying and pasting the URL from your browser.

You can also find helpful code snippets for configuring your package manager or installing a given package.

When you view packages in a group:

  • All packages published to the group and its projects are displayed.
  • Only the projects you can access are displayed.
  • If a project is private, or you are not a member of the project, the packages from that project are not displayed.

For information on how to create and upload a package, view the GitLab documentation for your package type.

Authenticate with the registry

Authentication depends on the package manager being used. For more information, see the docs on the specific package format you want to use.

For most package types, the following credential types are valid:

  • Personal access token: authenticates with your user permissions. Good for personal and local use of the package registry.
  • Project deploy token: allows access to all packages in a project. Good for granting and revoking project access to many users.
  • Group deploy token: allows access to all packages in a group and its subgroups. Good for granting and revoking access to a large number of packages to sets of users.
  • Job token: allows access to packages in the project running the job for the users running the pipeline. Access to other external projects can be configured.
  • If your organization uses two factor authentication (2FA), you must use a personal access token with the scope set to api.
  • If you are publishing a package via CI/CD pipelines, you must use a CI job token.

NOTE: If the "Package registry" feature is turned off for your project at Settings > General > Visibility, project features, permissions, you will receive a 403 Forbidden response. Accessing package registry via deploy token is not available when external authorization is enabled.

Use GitLab CI/CD

You can use GitLab CI/CD to build or import packages into a package registry.

To build packages

You can authenticate with GitLab by using the CI_JOB_TOKEN.

CI/CD templates, which you can use to get started, are in this repository.

For more information about using the GitLab package registry with CI/CD, see:

If you use CI/CD to build a package, extended activity information is displayed when you view the package details:

Package CI/CD activity

You can view which pipeline published the package, and the commit and user who triggered it. However, the history is limited to five updates of a given package.

To import packages

If you already have packages built in a different registry, you can import them into your GitLab package registry with the package importer.

For a list of supported packages, see Importing packages from other repositories.

Reduce storage usage

For information on reducing your storage use for the package registry, see Reduce package registry storage use.

Disable the package registry

The package registry is automatically enabled.

If you are using a self-managed instance of GitLab, your administrator can remove the menu item, Packages and registries, from the GitLab sidebar. For more information, see the administration documentation.

You can also remove the package registry for your project specifically:

  1. In your project, go to Settings > General.
  2. Expand the Visibility, project features, permissions section and disable the Packages feature.
  3. Select Save changes.

The Deploy > Package Registry entry is removed from the sidebar.

Package registry visibility permissions

Project-level permissions determine actions such as downloading, pushing, or deleting packages.

The visibility of the package registry is independent of the repository and can be controlled from your project's settings. For example, if you have a public project and set the repository visibility to Only Project Members, the package registry is then public. Disabling the Package Registry disables all package registry operations.

Project visibility Action Minimum role required
Public View package registry n/a, everyone on the internet can perform this action
Public Publish a package Developer
Public Pull a package n/a, everyone on the internet can perform this action
Internal View package registry Guest
Internal Publish a package Developer
Internal Pull a package Guest (1)
Private View package registry Reporter
Private Publish a package Developer
Private Pull a package Reporter (1)

Allow anyone to pull from package registry

To allow anyone to pull from the package registry, regardless of project visibility:

  1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find your private or internal project.
  2. Select Settings > General.
  3. Expand Visibility, project features, permissions.
  4. Turn on the Allow anyone to pull from Package Registry toggle.
  5. Select Save changes.

Anyone on the internet can access the package registry for the project.

Disable allowing anyone to pull

Prerequisites:

  • You must be an administrator.

To hide the Allow anyone to pull from Package Registry toggle globally:

Anonymous downloads are disabled, even for projects that turned on the Allow anyone to pull from Package Registry toggle.

Several known issues exist when you allow anyone to pull from the package registry:

  • Project-level endpoints are supported. Group-level and instance-level endpoints are not supported. Support for group-level endpoints is proposed in issue 383537.
  • It does not work with the Composer, because Composer only has a group endpoint.
  • It works with Conan, but using conan search does not work.

Accepting contributions

This table lists unsupported package manager formats that we are accepting contributions for. Consider contributing to GitLab. This development documentation guides you through the process.

Format Status
Chef #36889
CocoaPods #36890
Conda #36891
CRAN #36892
Opkg #36894
P2 #36895
Puppet #36897
RPM #5932
SBT #36898
Swift #12233
Vagrant #36899