GitLab Secrets Manager is generally available

GitLab Secrets Manager is generally available with GitLab 19.5, released October 15, 2026. It is offered to Premium and Ultimate customers on GitLab.com and on self-managed instances. Support for GitLab Dedicated is described as coming later, not in this release. The store is built on OpenBao. GitLab's argument is that build-time secrets and runtime secrets should sit under the same permissions and audit trail as the code, instead of in a second product with a second set of owners.

The launch post says CI secrets can be scoped to the jobs that need them, and that every CI read can record the pipeline and the job id. On GitLab.com, owners of a top-level group can start a trial of 30 days or 500 evaluation credits, whichever runs out first, from Secure and then Secrets Manager. A self-managed instance does not gain the feature by upgrading alone. An administrator has to install and enable it, following GitLab's sizing and high-availability notes. It is a place to govern credentials, not a new way to run jobs.

Why it matters

Build tokens and runtime credentials can live in the same permission system as the repository, which is where leaks usually start.

Source: GitLab