gitlab-whisper

gitlab-whisper

Have you ever tried to clone or update multiple projects at once from private Gitlab instance?
I decided to do that once, and, as a result, this project was born.

One might say this task can be easily solved with a simple bash script and would be right.
But there would be no fun in writing boring bash scripts when we have such a beautiful language as Go and maybe some spare time.

To tell the long story short, I created this tool with the primary goal of helping me with cloning (and subsequently updating) a bunch of projects from our private Gitlab instance to my local machine.
Maybe it might be useful for someone else too, so I'd better share it just in case.

Build

How to build this tool? The answer is simple - you will need "dep" tool to get all dependencies and, of course, working go compiler.

There is a simple Makefile, so the whole sequence of commands after cloning git repository is the following:

• make vendor
• make build

Also, I have prepared some binaries on releases page, so feel free to grab it from there.

Run

Here we assume that you have git binary installed.

To run you will need two environment variables exported:

• GITLAB_API_ENDPOINT
• GITLAB_API_PRIVATE_TOKEN

where GITLAB_API_ENDPOINT contains URL of Gitlab API endpoint (e.g., https://gitlab.com/api/v4) and GITLAB_API_PRIVATE_TOKEN is a personal token, issued via the web interface of Gitlab instance.

The command of prime interest is projects sync and, by default, it works in "dry run" mode (no local filesystem is touched).
In this mode, it prints a list of projects, which are going to be cloned or updated (if the project folder already exists).
To perform synchronization you need to pass -r option and wait for git to clone or fetch all the projects, member of which you are.

By default, projects are cloned to a path defined in GOPATH environment variable, but this could be easily overridden via -d option.

To avoid collisions of projects names directory structure repeats that of GOPATH.
For example:

GOPATH/
   |-src
      |-github.com
         |-mlosev
            |-gitlab-whisper

This structure has been proven as quite convenient, and in fact, this is entirely a monorepo.