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Gitlab User Management

Managing Project Permissions in GitLab

Our club utilizes the GitLab Free tier to manage a variety of resources, which are organized within a top-level group. To ensure the security of sensitive code while still allowing broad visibility, we employ a specific permission strategy.

The Baseline: Group-Level Permissions

The most effective strategy for managing access is to assign a role with limited capabilities, such as Reporter, to users at the top-level group. This role is then automatically inherited by all projects within that group. This provides members with the ability to view project code and participate in issue tracking without granting them modification rights.

The Challenge: Elevating Permissions for a Specific Project

A common point of confusion arises when you need to grant a user a higher role (like Developer or Maintainer) for a single project. When you navigate to the project's Project information > Members page, you will find that the role for an inherited member is "greyed out" and cannot be edited.

This is intentional behavior by GitLab, not a bug. The system enforces that permissions must be managed at their source. Since the user's base role is inherited from the parent group, it cannot be directly modified at the project level.

The Solution: Overriding Permissions with a Direct Invitation

The correct procedure is not to edit the inherited role, but to add a new, direct membership for the user to the specific project.

  1. Navigate to the project where the user needs elevated permissions.
  2. Go to Project information > Manage > Members.
  3. Click the Invite members button.
  4. Add the user who already has inherited access, but this time, assign them the desired higher role (e.g., Developer).

This method works because of GitLab's Principle of Maximal Role. When a user has multiple roles for the same project—in this case, a lower inherited role from the group and a higher direct role from the project invitation—GitLab automatically applies the role with the highest level of permissions. This effectively overrides their group-level permissions for that specific project only, while their access to all other projects in the group remains unchanged.