Integrate GitLab with BulkGate

GitLab was developed by Dmitriy Connectorozhets in 2011 under the name of “Project 11”. Two months later, after merging with another project “Project 13”, the project acquires its current name. From that moment on, the project has been developing fast. In 2014, GitLab gets it first major corporate sponsor in the form of venture capital firm Khosla Ventures. After the acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft, GitHub users are looking for alternatives to use in their open source projects. This is an opportunity for GitLab to acquire new customers, especially when GitHub’s prices are increasing because the service is doing well. Since then, GitLab has been able to attract many developers by offering them a free alternative to GitHub’s paid plans.

BulkGate is a bulk editing spution based on GitLab. This top allows you to mass edit your project’s files in a systematic manner. You can use this spution if you need to perform the same operation over many files or fpders. With BulkGate, you can change the commit message, author name, language, description and other meta-data of every file at once. Also, you can update file content or replace lines in all files at once. You can even remove or add files to your Git repository.

There are two ways to integrate BulkGate with GitLab. gitlab-bulkgate plugin and gitlab-bulk-plugin. The gitlab-bulkgate plugin is an official plugin from GitLab. It adds some features to GitLab that allow you to manage your files using BulkGate. On the other hand, gitlab-bulk-plugin is an unofficial plugin that integrates BulkGate with GitLab using some random webhooks on the server side. The great thing about the gitlab-bulk-plugin is that it is open sourced and maintained by third party users. However, on the other hand, the gitlab-bulkgate plugin comes with some limitations like:

It was built on top of GitLab API v4 and doesn’t support v5 yet.

You can only configure it inside the GitLab UI and not programmatically through an API v5 endpoint.

You cannot create more than one Job per Branch.

GitHub has a better integration with GitHub than GitHub has with GitLab. For example if I commit a change in my local repository and push it to my GitHub owned repository, GitHub will offer me to create a pull request and which happens automatically if I am logged in to my account on GitHub. But if I do the same operation with GitLab and my GitHub owned repository, I have to manually create a pull request from the dashboard of my repository on GitHub and then click on a webhook from GitLab that will send a merge request from my own repository to my own branch named as “gh-merge-requests” instead of “master” which is default branch of every repository hosted on GitHub. What’s more, I have to manually configure a webhook on my GitHub owned repository to accept merge requests from GitLab if I want the opposite behavior (incoming merge requests from a third party repository. All these things make integration with GitHub easier than with GitLab. If you have any questions about this topic feel free to comment below!

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