So, you have a bunch of projects on GitLab and you want to edit settings for all of them. For example, disable issues everywhere. There is a little guide how.
We’ll actively use the power of bash pipes, so the first thing you need is a good CLI client for GitLab with support for editing settings. I’ve picked python-gitlab. Let’s install it:
python3 -m pip install -U --user python-gitlab
Check if it works:
gitlab --version
Now, let’s give it an access. Generate a personal access token and set it as GITLAB_PRIVATE_TOKEN
environment variable:
export GITLAB_PRIVATE_TOKEN="insert-your-token-here"
How do you want to filter the projects you want to edit? In my case, I want to edit all projects in a specific group (organization is also considered a group from the API perspective). For that, you need to find out the group ID. So, let’s list all groups we have an access to with their name and ID:
gitlab group list
Add -o json
after gitlab
if you need more information.
Get IDs for all projects you own (and so can edit) in a specific group:
gitlab group-project list --group-id YOUR_GROUP_ID --owned=true --all
So, how to edit the settings for a given project? There is a subcommand gitlab project update
. It has a CLI reference (you can get the same by executing gitlab project update -h
) but it doesn’t have descriptions for any options. So, you’ll also need the official GitLab API reference, it has a good description for each field. You need both references, though, because the CLI doesn’t support some of the API fields.
So, if you want to disable issues for a project with ID 123:
gitlab project update --issues-access-level disabled --id 123
The output is pretty verbose. When we runn it in a loop, it will bloat the terminal. The tool has --fields
option but somehow it doesn’t work for me. So, instead we’ll output the result as a JSON and filter it using jq (install it with sudo apt install jq
):
gitlab -o json project update --issues-access-level disabled --id 123 | jq .name
And now, let’s glue everything together. We’ll use grep to extract IDs from the gitlab group-project list
output and xargs to call gitlab project update
with each ID as the last argument. Here is the result:
gitlab group-project list --group-id {{.GROUP_ID}} --owned=true --all \
| grep -oE '[0-9]+' \
| xargs -n1 gitlab -o json project update --issues-access-level disabled --id \
| jq .name
I hope it saved your day.
I use task for automating things. It’s like make but for normal humans. There is my taskfile for diabling everything that can be disabled on GitLab for a specific group:
# https://taskfile.dev
version: '3'
vars:
GROUP_ID: "123456"
env:
GITLAB_PRIVATE_TOKEN:
sh: cat .token
tasks:
install:
status:
- which gitlab
cmds:
- python3 -m pip install -U --user python-gitlab
groups:
cmds:
- gitlab -o json group list
bulk-update:
deps:
- install
cmds:
- >
gitlab group-project list --group-id {{.GROUP_ID}} --owned=true --all
| grep -oE '[0-9]+'
| xargs -n1
gitlab -o json project update
--analytics-access-level disabled
--auto-devops-enabled false
--container-registry-enabled false
--forking-access-level disabled
--issues-access-level disabled
--operations-access-level disabled
--pages-access-level disabled
--packages-enabled false
--remove-source-branch-after-merge true
--service-desk-enabled false
--snippets-access-level disabled
--squash-option default_off
--wiki-access-level disabled
{{.CLI_ARGS}} --id
| jq .name
run:
deps:
- install
cmds:
- gitlab {{.CLI_ARGS}}