New Gitpod Button has landed on GitLab Merge Request Pages

Reviewing merge requests is part of a developer’s everday life. The quality of code reviews is a crucial aspect of the development process. In reality, it often leads to just skiming the code changes and approving the merge request with a simple “LGTM”. One reason is that doing code reviews requires a context switch for the reviewer. For a careful review one needs to checkout the branch of the merge request, navigate through the code changes, build and test the changed software, … and hope that there will be no configuration drift or other inferences with the existing local developement setup.

This is a situation where ephemeral development environments show their full strength. With Gitpod, you get a fresh development environment just for your review. It has everything set-up for reviewing the changes and will be closed once the job is done. For a head-to-head comparison between local and cloud based workflows for MRs I recommend reading Mike’s blog post.

Launch a preconfigured Gitpod workspace from a GitLab merge request

Starting a Gitpod development environment is easy: Just add gitpod.io/# in front of a GitLab, GitHub, or Bitbucket URL in your browser’s address bar and hit Enter. That’s it.

With the native Gitpod integration in GitLab, it’s even easier! Next to the Web IDE button you’ll find a Gitpod button in a drop-down menu that has been introduced in GitLab 13.5. With the GitLab 14.2 release you’ll find this button on all merge request pages. Just hit the button and a cloud development environment waits for your review.

The GitLab docs provide you with further information on how to enable the Gitpod integration in your self-managed GitLab instance and how to use the Gitpod integration.

Contribution to GitLab awarded with “Golden Fork”

Every release, GitLab selects a community contributor as a most valuable person (MVP) of the release which is recognized with the prestigious golden fork. In the 14.2 release Cornelius from Gitpod has been awarded for the contribution of the Gitpod integration in GitLab.

Further reading

• GitLab 14.2 release blog post
• Blog post “Native GitLab Integration”
• GitLab docs about the Gitpod integration