How to clone all public repositories from gitlab server? - gitlab

There is an unstable gitlab server and I am not sure that it will be able to work in the future. Therefore, I want to make a backup copy of all the repositories (projects) that are there.
Cloning the source code will be enough, but it will be great if there is a way to save issues as well. Are there any ways to do this?

It depends on what kind of access you have, but if you don't have administrator access to do a full backup, then the best thing to do is to use a couple of API endpoints to get the information you need and go from there.
Use the Projects API to get a list of all projects accessible to you.
Note the pagination limits.
What you store depends on how you want to get the information.
Store at least the ID number of each.
Filter by membership if you only want the ones you're a member of.
Filter by min_access_level = maintainer (or higher) if you want to export whole projects.
Use the Project export API to trigger a project export for each project you're a member of, and you're a maintainer (or higher).
For all other projects where you have a lower role, or where it's public, you could still use git clone for the repositories by storing the ssh_url_to_repo or http_url_to_repo from the Projects API and running through each.
For all other parts of a project, you could store the JSON version to recreate them later if you want to go through the hassle. For example, for issues, use the Issues API.

Related

GitLab change permission of protected branches

We recently migrated to GitLab Self Hosted (V14.3.0)
We migrated 100+ repos to Gitlab and then we realized, by default only maintainers have write access to Gitlab protected branched.
Is there a way to change the following setting in one shot for multiple repositories or we will have to manually change for every repository?
We want to change "Allowed to merge" from "Maintainers" to "Developers + Maintainers"
In the main group we have set it to the following, I was hoping that this will make it work but no luck -
Well manually will be a bad approach, but the GitLab API offers a lot of functionality regarding that problem. I will not write the script, but i will outline you the APIs you can use and why you use them.
Fetch a list of all projects you want to change - the Projects API
GET /projects
With this endpoint you will receive a list of all the projects within you instance, on which the user has access - be aware that this is a paginated request - so just calling it once will not be sufficient.
Adapt the Protected branches - the Protected Branches API
With the project IDs from the first part you can now query each project and change the protection. We ended up with first deleting the protection and recreating them, because it has proven to be easier.
Anyway i recommend to automate this with a script, and do it rather sooner than later. As some projects might start with custom protections, and this can make the migration harder.
the GitLab API offers a lot of functionality regarding that problem
Actually, GitLab 15.6 (November 2022) does provide said API:
Update access levels from Protected Branch API
Previously, the UI was required to update the access levels of protected
branches. The API required you to unprotect, then reprotect, a branch when
updating its access levels.
Now, the
protected branches API
enables you to directly update which users or groups are allowed_to_push, allowed_to_merge,
allowed_to_unprotect, and more.
This one-step method decreases the risk of a bot
changing this setting and leaving a branch unprotected.
See Documentation and Issue.

Gitlab change default branch for every project

I am currently using GitLab Community Edition 9.0.0 and want to change default branch to "develop" for every project.
I know it can be done by project settings page but since we have almost 200 projects, is there easy way to do it?
You could use the Gitlab API to:
Get a list of all the projects (see here)
Loop on that list and edit every project to set the default_branch parameter (see here)
Here's more documentation on how to use the API.
You fist need to get a user's private token. Go to http://<gitlab_domain>/profile/account to get/generate one for your currently logged in user. You may want to do that as the gitlab administrator in order to have access to and be able to modify all those projects.
Then you need to generate the proper requests (see links above and this).

push local gitlab site issues and comments to remote repo

I've been using git for a little while now in a new project I am working on.
I decided to use GitLab.com as I would like the opportunity to keep me repos private until I'm ready to share them (which github doesn't allow me to do).
The whole beauty of git for me is that I have a copy of the whole repo on my local machine and on the remote site.
However I make lots of comments, on my 'local' gitlab instance.
I know that I can put the wiki into source control, is it possibly to do the same thing with the comments and milestones (or in some other way share them between repositories)
I feel that this should be possible.
Maybe using an rss feed to push and pull the data to / from the various locations.
Or can I use the issues as a 'mailing list' somehow, with a 'mail into list' (however I would then need to get my local gitlab instance to mail any new issues to the remote - could probably be setup using some form of 'auto forward' filter in my mail client / gmail.
Are any of these ideas even possible ?
Is there a better solution - I'd prefer something that will integrate into my gitlab instance (local and remote), rather than needing having to use a separate interface ~ I like everything to be in a single place if possible.
Remember also I like to have access to my issues etc when offline (and then have them 'sync' when I go back online).
Thanks for any help in advance.
David
You could build a script and make use of the API to sync your issues and notes. Maybe a script that pulls all of the new issues and notes and POSTs them to the equivalent projects on GitLab.com. You could run the script manually or create a cron job to post the new items periodically.

What is the best way to share cruisecontrol configurations on a Linux server?

I have a team that will be using CruiseControl for continuous integration, and CC will be running on a Linux server. More than one team member may need to access the CC configuration itself: changing how tests are run, changing notification rules, etc.
What is the best practice for this?
My first thought was to set up a cc-users group, then make a shared directory somewhere (such as /usr/local, I suppose, or a new directory like /projects), where the directory has r/w for the group.
Am I missing any complications with this plan? Obviously, I've never been in charge of such a project before, otherwise I wouldn't ask such a question.
FWIW, my intention is to have all the cc configuration files under mercurial so we can roll back in case of breakage.
I have version-controlled the whole of cruisecontrol configuration, along with the project specific config files underneath it.This way, the write-access can be controlled per requirement, using your source control tool's access control method (in our case subversion) thus providing tracking as well. Whomsoever needs to make a change can checkout the file config.xml in their own workspace and make their changes and then commit. You may want to consider the same approach.

How to set up a git repository where different users can only see certain parts?

How do you set up a git repository where some users can see certain parts of the source code and other users can see all of it? I've seen lots of guides for only giving certain users commit access, but these assume everyone should have read access. I've also heard of gitosis, but I'm not sure it supports this and it hasn't had any commits in over a year so I think it's dead.
In short: you can't. Git is snapshot based (at conceptual level at least) version control system, not changeset based one. It treats project (repository) as a whole. The history is a history of a project, not a union of single-file histories (it is more than joining of per-file histories).
Using hooks like update-paranoid hook in contrib, or VREFs mechanism of gitolite, you can allow or forbid access to repository, you can allow or forbid access to individual branches. You can even forbid any commits that change things in specified subdirectory. But the project is always treated as a whole.
Well, there is one thing you can do: make a directory you want to restrict access to into submodule, and restrict access to this submodule repository.
The native git protocol doesn't support this; git assumes in many places that everybody has a complete copy of all of the history.
That said, one option may be to use git-subtree to split off part of the repository into its own subset repository, and periodically merge back.
Git doesn't support access control on the repository. You can however, implement access control on the repository yourself, by using hooks, more specifically the update hook.
Jörg has already pointed out that you can use hooks to do this. Exactly which hook(s) you need depends on your setup. If you want the permissions on a repo that gets pushed to, you'll need the update hook like he said. However, if it's on a repo that you're actually working in (committing and merging), you'll also need the pre-commit and post-merge hooks. The githooks manpage (Jörg linked to this too) notes that there's in fact a script in the contrib section demonstrating a way to do this. You can get this by grabbing a git tarball, or pull it out of git's gitweb repo: setgitperms.perl. Even if you're only using the update hook, that might be a useful model.
In general, Git is not intended for this. By now it seems to have out-of-the-box access control only up to the repository level.
But if you need just to hide some part of secret information in your Git repository (which is often the case) you can use git-crypt (https://github.com/AGWA/git-crypt) with encryption keys shared based on users GPG keys (https://gnupg.org/).
Alternatively you can use git submodules (https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Submodules) if you can break your codebase to logical parts. Then all users receive access only to certain repositories which you then integrate into 'large' codebase through sub-modules where you add other code and allow it for only 'privileged' users.

Resources