RepoBee and GitLab

As of v2.3.0, RepoBee fully supports GitLab for all commands, both on https://gitlab.com and on self-hosted GitLab instances. The functionality is new, so please report any bugs you find on the issue tracker <https://github.com/repobee/repobee/issues/new>. All of RepoBee’s system tests run against a GitLab instances, so I have every intention of continuing to improve the GitLab experience.

Note

GitLab support is currently in alpha, and may not yet be sufficiently stable for production use. Please report any issues on the issue tracker

Important

RepoBee requires GitLab 11.11 or later. This is only relevant if you have a self-hosted GitLab instance.

GitLab terminology

RepoBee uses GitHub terminology, as GitHub is the primary platform. It is however simple to map the terminology between the two platforms as follows:

GitHub	GitLab
Organization	Group
Team	Subgroup
Repository	Project
Issue	Issue

So, if you read “target organization” in the documentation, that translates directly to “target group” when using GitLab. Although there are a few practical differences, the concepts on both platforms are similar enough that it makes no difference as far as using RepoBee goes. You can read more about differences and similarities in this GitLab blog post.

How to use RepoBee with GitLab

You must use the gitlab plugin for RepoBee to be able to interface with GitLab. See Using Existing Plugins for instructions on how to use plugins. Provide the url to a GitLab instance host (not to the api endpoint, just to the host) as an argument to --bu|--base-url, or put it in the config file as the value for option base_url. Other than that, there are a few important differences between GitHub and GitLab that the user should be aware of.

• As noted, the base url should be provided to the host of the GitLab instance, and not to any specific endpoint (as is the case when using GitHub). When using github.com for example, the url should be provided as base_url = https://gitlab.com in the config.
• The org-name and master-org-name arguments should be given the path of the respective groups. If you create a group with a long name, GitLab may shorten the path automatically. For example, I created the group repobee-master-repos, and it got the path repobee-master. You can find your path by going to the landing page of your group and checking the URL: the path is the last part. You can change the path manually by going to your group, then Settings->General->Path,transfer,remove and changing the group path.

Getting an access token for GitLab

Creating a personal access token token for a GitLab API is just as easy as creating one for GitHub. Just follow these instructions. The scopes you need to tick are api, read_user, read_repository and write_repository. That’s it!

Roadmap

The roadmap for GitLab support is listed below. As GitLab is now fully supported, this serves only as a record of history (and to not break links I may have put elsewhere and then forgotten about :) ).

Command	Status	ETA/Added in
show-config	Done	N/A (not platform dependent)
setup	Done	v1.5.0
update	Done	v1.5.0
clone	Done	v1.5.0
migrate	Done	v1.6.0
open-issues	Done	v1.6.0
close-issues	Done	v1.6.0
list-issues	Done	v1.6.0
assign-reviews	Done	v2.3.0
end-reviews	Done	v2.3.0
check-reviews	Done	v2.3.0
verify-settings	Done	v2.3.0