# Public access · Public access · Help · GitLab
GitLab Community Edition

# Public access

GitLab allows you to change your projects' visibility in order be accessed publicly or internally.

Projects with either of these visibility levels will be listed in the public access directory (`/public` under your GitLab instance). Here is the GitLab.com example.

Internal projects will only be available to authenticated users.

## Visibility of projects

### Public projects

Public projects can be cloned without any authentication.

They will also be listed on the public access directory (`/public`).

Any logged in user will have Guest permissions on the repository.

### Internal projects

Internal projects can be cloned by any logged in user.

They will also be listed on the public access directory (`/public`) for logged in users.

Any logged in user will have Guest permissions on the repository.

### How to change project visibility

1. Go to your project's Settings
2. Change "Visibility Level" to either Public, Internal or Private

## Visibility of groups

> Note: Starting with GitLab 8.6, the group visibility has changed and can be configured the same way as projects. In previous versions, a group's page was always visible to all users.

Like with projects, the visibility of a group can be set to dictate whether anonymous users, all signed in users, or only explicit group members can view it. The restriction for visibility levels on the application setting level also applies to groups, so if that's set to internal, the explore page will be empty for anonymous users. The group page now has a visibility level icon.

## Visibility of users

The public page of a user, located at `/username`, is always visible whether you are logged in or not.

When visiting the public page of a user, you can only see the projects which you are privileged to.

If the public level is restricted, user profiles are only visible to logged in users.

## Restricting the use of public or internal projects

In the Admin area under Settings (`/admin/application_settings`), you can restrict the use of visibility levels for users when they create a project or a snippet:

This is useful to prevent people exposing their repositories to public by accident. The restricted visibility settings do not apply to admin users.