One important thing that might be worth doing, is generating ssh keys and linking them to lxplus and your local machine.
GitLab supports secure communication between Git and its servers using SSH keys.
The SSH protocol provides this security and allows you to authenticate to the GitLab remote server without supplying your username or password each time.
Instructions for generating keys and linking them to your GitLab account can be found here. You can test your keys on the CERN GitLab instance with:
ssh git@gitlab.cern.ch -T -p 7999
which should return a message like “Welcome to GitLab”. Let us know if you are having trouble with this.