In Visual Studio App Center, a first step to building your app is to select a source provider. As a crucial step in the build process, we are always hoping to make this as seamless as possible. To continue this mission, we are excited to announce the completion of our top feature request for the past few months – support for GitLab.com as a source provider! Here’s what it looks like:

Upon creating a new app and selecting Build from the left-hand side menu, you are prompted to select a service as a source provider. Now, you will be able to select GitLab as a service, in addition to any of the previously supported services – Azure Repos, Bitbucket, and GitHub.

From here, Build continues to offer a quick and easy workflow to build your app: you will be redirected to GitLab to authorize App Center to read your repositories, and upon redirect, all of the repositories that your account is associated with will be listed. You can then select a repository, which will return all the branches within your repository.

This list of branches will automatically update, without refresh, upon any creation, update, or deletion of a branch. Finally, you can specify a branch to configure, and our Build service will analyze your repository, traversing it to detect any relevant projects to the app’s OS and platform. With that, your app is ready to be built, all within a few clicks.

App Center allows you, as a developer, to focus on your code by taking care of everything else. We set up Continuous Integration for your apps, quickly connecting your repository, building your app on every commit, configuring tests to run on real devices, distributing updates to users, and automatically releasing to app stores. By adding support for GitLab, this pipeline is now also available for projects hosted in GitLab.

In addition, we will soon be looking into supporting self-hosted instances of GitLab, as interest in the initial feature request was split between self-hosted and general GitLab support – contribute to the conversation here! But in the meantime, we are excited to enable this support, and are looking forward to hearing your feedback. Sign up for App Center today to check out the integration, and bring your projects hosted in GitLab to life!