I built a better Slack integration for GitLab & GitLab Self Hosted
I recently joined a new company and coming from GitHub and the 100s of integrations for it, the GitLab and especially the GitLab Self Hosted marketplace felt dire.
I was very used to my PRs (and now MRs) landing in a Slack channel like #fe-reviews, and the comments & reviews on it to land in that Slack thread. It meant I never missed comments and my PR/MRs were reviewed MUCH quicker.
Other than Axolo, no other tool that does what I'd like supports GitLab, so I built mergeme.dev
Some of the key features that I wanted myself (and I'm sure others will appreciate) are:
- One Slack message per MR that updates in place (open > in review > approved > merged)
- Review comments as thread replies on that card
- Per-project channel routing - each project can map to whichever Slack channel you want
- GitLab @ mentions ACTUALLY ping the right person on Slack with a one-time username map
- GitLab.com via OAuth - webhooks registered for you
- Self-hosted GitLab - paste a webhook URL into your instance
- [New] You can set up label mapping too, an MR with "bug" as it's label goes to #qa-reviews instead
If your team already works tightly in Slack and you ping your colleagues "hey can you review this again" then mergeme.dev might just be a great inclusion to your workflow!
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Aside from this, I am genuinely curious as to how people handle this problem in their own setup?
My personal story before MergeMe was that I set up webhooks into Slack from GitLab directly and I made a custom webhook triggered workflow to send myself messages when my own MRs were responded to. It was a MESS to look at and it's what unironically pushed me to build a better tool lmao.