How to create a GitLab merge request via command l

Question

We are working on integrating GitLab (enterprise edition) in our tooling, but one thing that is still on our wishlist is to create a merge request in GitLab via a command line (or batchfile or similar, for that matter). We would like to integrate this in our tooling. Searching here and on the web lead me to believe that this is not possible with native GitLab, but that we need additional tooling for that.

Am I correct? And what kind of tooling would I want to use for this?

Answer 1

You can use following utility.

Disclosure : I developed it.

https://github.com/vishwanatharondekar/gitlab-cli

It's developed in javascript. You can create merge request using this.

Some of the features it has are.

1. Base branch is optional. If base branch is not provided. Current branch is used as base branch.
2. target branch is optional. If target branch is not provided, default branch of the repo in gitlab will be used.
3. Created pull request page will be opened automatically after successful creation.
4. If title is not supported with -m option value. It will be taken from in place editor opened. First line is taken as title.
5. In the editor opened third line onwards takes as description.
6. Comma separated list of labels can be provided with its option.
7. Supports CI.
8. Repository specific configs can be given.
9. squash option is available.
10. remove source branch option is available.

Answer 2

It's not natively supported, but it's not hard to throw together. The gitlab API has support for opening MR: https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/master/doc/api/merge_requests.md#create-mr

Answer 3

As of now, GitLab sadly does not support this, however I recently saw it on their issue tracker. It appears one can expect a 'native tool' in the upcoming months.

GitLab tweeted out about numa08/git-gitlab some time ago, so I guess this would be worth a try.

Answer 4

I use https://github.com/mdsb100/cli-gitlab

I am creating the MR from inside of a gitlab CI docker container based on alpine linux, so I include the install command in before-script (that could also be included in your image). All commands in the following .gitlab-ci.yml file, are also relevant for normal command line usage (as long as you have the cli-gitlab npm installed).

variables:
    TARGET_BRANCH: 'live'
    GITLAB_URL: 'https://your.gitlab.net'
    GITLAB_TOKEN: $PRIVATE_TOKEN #created in user profile & added in project settings
before-script:
    -apk update && apk add nodejs && npm install cli-gitlab -g
script:
    - gitlab url $GITLAB_URL && gitlab token $GITLAB_TOKEN
    - 'echo "gitlab addMergeRequest $CI_PROJECT_ID $CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME \"$TARGET_BRANCH\" 13 `date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`"'
    - 'gitlab addMergeRequest $CI_PROJECT_ID $CI_COMMIT_REF_NAME "$TARGET_BRANCH" 13 `date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S` 2> ./mr.json'
    - cat ./mr.json

This will echo true if the merge request already exists, and echo the json result of the new MR if it succeeds to create one (also saving to a mr.json file).