Creating a Gitlab Merge Request from the Command Line

I quite like working with Merge Requests for Code Reviews and for providing a Feature Changelog.

Additionally, I tend to create them quite early. Sometimes even when creating a new branch.

This allows me to assign other people who might be interested on the progress of the Feature I’m working on.

Neatly, Gitlab already shows you a Link when pushing to a branch.

This URL creates a MR for the branch feature/my-branch.

https://gitlab.com/GROUP/REPO/-/merge_requests/new?merge_request%5Bsource_branch%5D=feature%2Fmy-branch

Another way is using Git Push Options.

Gitlab Push Options

When pushing a commit to your Gitlab repository, you can specify some useful options. Note that this only passes variables to branch pipelines and not merge request pipelines.

# skip pipeline upon push
git push -o ci.skip
 
# add ci variables to pipeline
git push -o ci.variable="DEPLOY=QA"
 
# create a new MR from this branch
git push -o merge_request.create
 
# set MR assigne
git push -o merge_request.assign="<user>"

See Push options | GitLab

Additionally, for the case of already having pushed, I created a script to create the MR.

Shell Script to Create a Gitlab MR for the Current Branch

What it does:

• Gets the URL of the repository with git remote get-url origin
• Get the current branch name with git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD
• Encodes it properly, using my urlencode.sh script.
• Generates the correct Gitlab URL to create the MR
• Opens the link with xdg-open

#!/bin/sh
 
# USAGE: Create a new Merge Request to master for the current branch
 
GIT_REMOTE=$(git remote get-url origin)
GITLAB_URL=$(echo "$GIT_REMOTE" |
    # convert ssh urls to https
    sed 's#^git@gitlab.com:\(.*\).git#https://gitlab.com/\1#g' |
    # remove .git suffix
    sed 's#.git$##g'
)
CURRENT_BRANCH="$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)"
GIT_SOURCE_BRANCH="$(urlencode.sh "$CURRENT_BRANCH")"
OPT_SOURCE_BRANCH="merge_request%5Bsource_branch%5D=${GIT_SOURCE_BRANCH}"
 
# open the url
xdg-open "${GITLAB_URL}/-/merge_requests/new?${OPT_SOURCE_BRANCH}"

Here’s the version I currently use.