GitLab merger bot

What does it do?

The goal is to have green master after every merge. To achieve this, you have to rebase every single merge request just before a merge and wait for the pipeline status. It takes a lot of time to manually maintain, especially when you have to process multiple merge requests at once (common situation for large projects, monorepos etc.). So let's automate it with GitLab MergerBot.

1. When your merge request is ready to be merged, assign it to the bot.
2. The bot will add your request to its own serial (FIFO) queue. (single queue for every repository)
3. When your request is on the turn, the bot will rebase the MR and start waiting for the pipeline.
4. When the bot detects some problems with the merge request it'll reassign the merge request back to the author.
   Reasons can be for example:
   • Failing pipeline or pipeline waiting for a manual action
   • The merge request has unresolved discussions
   • The merge request can't be rebased due to a conflict

Advanced features

• Autogenerated commit message based on MR title (Suffixed with a link to the original MR).
• Blocking jobs are triggered automatically. Very useful for E2E testing etc.
• Bot skips squashing when the bot:skip-squash label is present on a MR.
• Bot assigns a MR to the start of the queue when the bot:high-priority label is present. This is useful for hotfixes etc.

Pre-Installation requirements

Get the auth token

1. Create a new account for your bot-user
2. Sign-in to GitLab as the bot-user and go to https://gitlab.com/profile/personal_access_tokens
3. Add new personal access token with the api scope

We strongly recommend using a separate account for the bot-user. Don't reuse an existing account that can leave the project in the future.

Setup a GitLab repository

1. Make sure that your bot-user has privileges to accept merge requests
2. In the General Settings - Merge Request section:
   • set Merge method to Fast-forward merge
   • check Only allow merge requests to be merged if the pipeline succeeds
   • check (optionally) All discussions must be resolved

Usage

Running in kubernetes (with HELM)

To add the Helm Chart for your local client, run helm repo add:

helm repo add gitlab-merger-bot https://pepakriz.github.io/gitlab-merger-bot

And install it:

helm install --name gitlab-merger-bot gitlab-merger-bot \
#	--set settings.gitlabUrl="https://gitlab.mycompany.com" \
	--set settings.authToken="<token>"

Running in docker

docker run -d --name gitlab-merger-bot --restart on-failure \
#	-e GITLAB_URL="https://gitlab.mycompany.com" \
	-e GITLAB_AUTH_TOKEN="<token>" \
	-v "$(pwd)/data":/data \
	pepakriz/gitlab-merger-bot:latest

Running as a plain JS app

yarn install
yarn run build
GITLAB_AUTH_TOKEN="<token>" yarn run start

Configuration options

Env variable	Default value
GITLAB_URL	https://gitlab.com	GitLab instance URL
GITLAB_AUTH_TOKEN		required Your GitLab token
ALLOWED_PROJECT_IDS	``	It'll restrict operation only on selected projects. (comma separated list)
HTTP_PROXY	``	Use HTTP proxy for API communication
CI_CHECK_INTERVAL	10	Time between CI checks (in seconds)
MR_CHECK_INTERVAL	20	Time between merge-requests checks (in seconds)
REMOVE_BRANCH_AFTER_MERGE	true	It'll remove branch after merge
SQUASH_MERGE_REQUEST	true	It'll squash commits on merge
PREFER_GITLAB_TEMPLATE	false	Use Gitlab template instead of custom message
AUTORUN_MANUAL_BLOCKING_JOBS	true	It'll autorun manual blocking jobs before merge
SKIP_SQUASHING_LABEL	bot:skip-squash	It'll skip squash when MR contains this label
HIGH_PRIORITY_LABEL	bot:high-priority	It'll put MR with this label to the beginning of the queue
SENTRY_DSN	``	It'll enable Sentry monitoring
HTTP_SERVER_ENABLE	false	It'll enable experimental API and dashboard support
HTTP_SERVER_PORT	4000	It'll use different http server port
WEB_HOOK_TOKEN	``	It'll enable experimental web hook support
WEB_HOOK_HISTORY_SIZE	100	It's useful just primarily for debugging purposes.
ENABLE_PERMISSION_VALIDATION	false	It'll enable experimental permission validation

Development

For web hook development use this:

export NGROK_AUTHTOKEN=<authCode>
docker run -it --rm --net=host -p 4040:4040 -e NGROK_AUTHTOKEN="$NGROK_AUTHTOKEN" wernight/ngrok ngrok http 4000