GitLab

Overview

GitLab is an all-in-one CI/CD and source code management platform that streamlines software development. Benefit from GitLab's vast repository data within Rely.io for a comprehensive view of your software lifecycle.

Installation Guide

Integrate GitLab with your Rely.io platform to centralize your code repositories, merge requests, and much more. By integrating GitLab, you can better manage your services, streamline your DevOps processes, and ensure that your teams are always on the same page.

Required Permissions for GitLab plugin

During the configuration process, you'll be asked to provide an Access Token. This token must have the following permissions in order for the Rely.io GitLab plugin to work.

Read

✅ API	Enables Rely.io to make API calls to GitLab for various activities like fetching repositories, branches, and merge requests.
✅ Repository	Allows Rely.io to pull repository metadata.

The following steps will guide you through the process of generating this Access Token.

Steps to Integrate GitLab with Rely.io

Step 1: Navigate to your organization's GitLab Group page

Start by logging into GitLab and navigating to your organization's group page (e.g. https://gitlab.com/detech.ai). In the side panel expand the Settings sub-menu and click Access tokens.

Navigate to Access Tokens page

This option will only be available if you have the required permissions. To view and create access tokens at the group level, you must have one of the following roles within the group:

• Owner

• Maintainer

Step 2: Generate GitLab Group Access Token

1. Click on Add new token.

2. We recommend assigning the role of Owner for this token to ensure full access to all group-related data, which is crucial for seamless integration. Setting the role to a lower level, such as Guest, may result in limited functionality, such as restricted access to private projects, repositories, and CI/CD pipelines. This could prevent essential data from being retrieved and hinder integration performance.

3. Check the required scopes (read_api, read_repository) for the token.

4. Name your token for easier future reference, such as "Rely.io GitLab Integration".

5. Click on Create group access token.

In case these steps are not clear follow GitLab's official documentation on how to create group

Once the token is created, make sure to copy and store it securely; you'll need it for the next steps.

Step 3: Connect GitLab to Rely.io

1. Open Rely.io and select Plugins from with the Portal Builder.

2. Click the Add Data Source button and select GitLab from the dropdown.

3. A prompt will appear, asking for details to establish the integration.

   • Plugin Name: Provide a name for the GitLab plugin.

   • Organization Name: Name of your GitLab organization which you can copy from the url (e.g. https://gitlab.com/[YOUR_ORGANIZATION_NAME])
   • Access Token: Paste the GitLab Access token generated in Step 2.

Configure GitLab plugin

To prevent pulling outdated or stale data from your tools and flooding your catalog with unactionable entities, our plugins are set by default with policies to reduce noise.

For instance in the case of Git providers:

• Repositories with no activity over the last 3 months are ignored

• Repositories that have been archived are also ignored

• All entities related to ignored repositories (Merge Requests, Issues, Deployments, etc.) are consequently ignored

After you add the GitLab plugin, an entity discovery run will be triggered. The initial discovery run can take up to a few minutes. By the end of this discovery run:

• New blueprints will be added to your data model

• Entities retrieved from the data source will be added to the Discovery page for you to either approve or reject them

The plugin periodically updates all retrieved entities to ensure they stay in sync with their external counterparts.

Once the initial discovery run completes successfully you should see your GitLab plugin under the Active section of the data sources page.

Active plugins list

The next step is to get the GitLab entities imported into your Service Catalog. Check our official guidance on how to do it.