👀 Exploring the GitLab Knowledge Graph

September 19, 2025

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Jean-Phi Baconnais

Every month I enjoyed reading the GitLab Release. In the last one (18.4), a new tool, under active development, appeared in the GitLab ecosystem : GitLab Knowledge Graph (gkg). GKG gives you a graphic representation of your code.

Let’s go to discover together this (very interesting and promising) tool.

GKG Install

First step, install it. In my case, having a MacBookPro, it was very quick:

curl -fsSL https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/rust/knowledge-graph/-/raw/main/install.sh | bash

Next, I added an alias on my .zshrc file and I can use it with the gkg command.

https://gitlab-org.gitlab.io/rust/knowledge-graph/#get-started-in-minutes

My “crash test”project was my communities-api (https://gitlab.com/communities-api/communities-api).

The gkg index command launch a scan of your project. This action was quick for this project.

Final step, run th server with the gkg server start command and it is available on http://127.0.0.1:27495.

Note, you can index or re-index a project directly in the GKG UI:

I didn’t test the IDEA integration yet.

GKG in action

GKG display the graphic in a simplify interface:

On the generated graph, we can see different types of elements as all directories and files.

Dependencies are also displayed. In this Java project, we can see Java class imported in each class:

The last type is “definition” and we can see Java class, Java methods, Javascript constants which appear as definitions.

And the last feature is to have the possibility to search item

Feedbacks

This new GitLab tool is under development but this first version is very interesting. This type of tool responds to a common problem in many teams/enterprises and I am sure that it will be adopted by a lot of teams to understand projects and have a quick look to dependencies on complex projects.

Check out the blog post about this release: https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2025/09/18/gitlab-18-4-released/