A Bit of Action for Pull/Merge Requests and the Tokens UI

After a quiet vacation month in August, we’re back with changes to improve workflows in the integration between OBS and source code management systems (SCM) like GitHub and GitLab. Workflows are cleaning up after themselves when pull/merge requests are closed or merged. And additionally to that, you can now regenerate and trigger tokens in the web UI.

If you haven’t already, join the beta program to start integrating OBS with SCMs.

We started off the continuous integration between OBS and GitHub/GitLab in May 2021, then made some improvements in June 2021. We introduced advanced features like reporting filters and support for self-hosted SCM together with a list of common pitfalls in July 2021 and in August 2021, we continued with two new steps and a UI for tokens. In September 2021, we supported more actions for pull/merge requests, improved the UI for tokens, and added support for push events and a rebuild step. In November 2021, we presented the user documentation and further improvements for the UI for tokens and workflow runs and more. We worked on UI and reporting improvements in February 2022, followed by a step to trigger services and the improvement of the error messages in April 2022. Afterwards, we clarified the separation between incoming webhooks and status reports in May 2022, then sharing tokens was made possible in June 2022. Later in July 2022, we added support for the SCM Bridge feature. Around September 2022, the feature was considered stable, so we enabled it for all the OBS users, but that wasn’t the end; later in September we reached the milestone of supporting Gitea on top of GitHub and GitLab. In December 2022 we introduced placeholder variables in addition to a customizable configuration file location. Later on we brought notifications for failed workflow runs, and now we introduced a new way of listing the events by multiple filter parameters

This feature is documented in the SCM/CI Workflow Integration chapter of the OBS User Guide.

Some More Action?

From now on, we support closed, merged and reopened pull/merge requests.

Workflows are cleaning up after themselves when pull/merge requests are closed or merged. Projects in which you branched or linked packages will be deleted, same thing for the repositories you configured for those projects.

Don’t worry though, if you change your mind and reopen a pull/merge request which was previously closed, this will also be handled by workflows. Your projects, their branched/linked packages and their configured repositories will be restored.

Regenerate and Trigger Tokens in the UI

Previously, if you happened to lose the secret string of a token, you had to delete it and create a new token. While this definitely works, we can do better! There is now a Regenerate button on the Edit Token page. Here’s how it looks:

It’s not all we did in the web UI. Tokens can now be triggered on the Trigger Token page. This is available for all token types, except workflow tokens. This is how it works:

What’s Next?

In the upcoming weeks, we will be working on supporting push events from GitHub and GitLab. This will allow you to run workflows when pushing commits to a branch. We’re pretty sure you’ll create useful workflows with that. There will also be new workflow steps going with this! Until then, give us feedback, it really helps!

How To Give Us Feedback

There are two ways to reach us:

• On GitHub, by opening an issue and / or commenting on an already opened issue.
• On IRC, by talking directly to us. We are in the channel #opensuse-buildservice on Libera.Chat.

Please note that we favor GitHub to gather feedback as it allows us to easily keep track of the discussions.