GitLab NotBot

This service is a workaround for the lack of "NOT" filter in GitLab issues. There is an issue (feature) reported to GitLab requesting to introduce this, but it has been planned, rephrased and delayed multiple times.

This service automatically adds "inverted" labels for all labels missing from issues. It does this by listening for issue update webhook and updating the issue labels whenever labels change.

For example, if a project has labels "bug", "design", "testing" and an issue is created with label "bug", this bot will add labels "~design" and "~testing". This way it'll be possible, for example, to find all issues that do not have "testing" tag, as they will have tag "~testing".

Installation

Download and compile by running

go get github.com/astax-t/gitlab-notbot

This creates the executable file $GOPATH/bin/gitlab-notbot[.exe]. Follow the Cross Compiling guide if you need to build the binary for a different platform.

Alternatively, download pre-built binaries from github releases in this project.

Configuration

The service uses environment variables and/or .env file for configuration. Take a look at the example file .env-example for the list of available variables. You can copy this file to .env, update the values and put it next to the executable. Note, variables defined in .env file do not overwrite the variables already defined in environment.

So the installation steps are the following:

• Go to your settings in GitLab and click "Access Tokens". Create a new token and allow "api" scope access. If you're running a standalone instance of GitLab, it's a good idea to create a separate user for this - call it "NotBot", for example, and give it "Reporter" right for the GitLab project.
• Put the GitLab URL and the access token into .env file.
• Also you'll probably want to change the value of LISTEN_HOST unless you're running the bot on the same server as GitLab. Set it to "*" in this case.
• Alternatively, put all these values into environment variables.
• Run the service executable.
• Go to GitLab again, Project Settings, Integrations, and add a new webhook pointing to the NotBot service, such as http://localhost:8085. Set Issue events checkbox and unset all other.
• Test the webhook for issue event and check the output of the NotBot service. You may set higher debug level for initial tests.

TODO / Known problems

• Currently list of all available labels is fetched for every issue update. This works ok for not very busy instances of GitLab, but may be slow on higher load.
• Only up to 100 project labels are fetched, which leaves only 50 "real" labels which can be effectively used (due to 50 more "inverted" labels). But if you have more than this, probably this bot shouldn't be used as each issue will have too many labels.
• Perhaps it would be good to have a filter/regexp to restrict which labels are included into processing. Some labels may not need "NOT" filter.
• Create a command line tool to add the webhook to all projects in a group
• Create a command line tool to update all existing or all not closed issues to add the inverted tags