• Set up database with developer seeds
  • Environment variables
  • Seeding Data
    • Seeding issues for all projects or a single project
    • Seeding issues for Insights charts
    • Seeding groups with subgroups
    • Seeding a runner fleet test environment
    • Seeding custom metrics for the monitoring dashboard
    • Seed a project with vulnerabilities
    • Seed a project with environments
    • Seed a group with dependencies
    • Seed CI variables
    • Seed a project for merge train development
  • Automation
  • Discard stdout
  • Extra Project seed options
• Run tests
  • Run RSpec tests which failed in merge request pipeline on your machine
  • Speed up tests, Rake tasks, and migrations
• RuboCop tasks
• Generate initial RuboCop TODO list
  • Run RuboCop in graceful mode
• Compile Frontend Assets
• Emoji tasks
• Update project templates
• Generate route lists
• Show obsolete ignored_columns
• Validate GraphQL queries
• Analyze GraphQL queries
• Update GraphQL documentation and schema definitions
  • Update machine-readable schema files
  • Update documentation and schema definitions
• Update audit event types documentation
• Update OpenAPI client for Error Tracking feature
• Update banned SSH keys
• Output current navigation structure to YAML

Rake tasks for developers

Rake tasks are available for developers and others contributing to GitLab.

Set up database with developer seeds

If your database user does not have advanced privileges, you must create the database manually before running this command.

bundle exec rake setup

The setup task is an alias for gitlab:setup. This tasks calls db:reset to create the database, and calls db:seed_fu to seed the database. db:setup calls db:seed but this does nothing.

Environment variables

MASS_INSERT: Create millions of users (2m), projects (5m) and its relations. It’s highly recommended to run the seed with it to catch slow queries while developing. Expect the process to take up to 20 extra minutes.

See also Mass inserting Rails models.

LARGE_PROJECTS: Create large projects (through import) from a predefined set of URLs.

Seeding Data

Seeding issues for all projects or a single project

You can seed issues for all or a given project with the gitlab:seed:issues task:

# All projects
bin/rake gitlab:seed:issues

# A specific project
bin/rake "gitlab:seed:issues[group-path/project-path]"

By default, this seeds an average of 2 issues per week for the last 5 weeks per project.

Seeding issues for Insights charts

You can seed issues specifically for working with the Insights charts with the gitlab:seed:insights:issues task:

# All projects
bin/rake gitlab:seed:insights:issues

# A specific project
bin/rake "gitlab:seed:insights:issues[group-path/project-path]"

By default, this seeds an average of 10 issues per week for the last 52 weeks per project. All issues are also randomly labeled with team, type, severity, and priority.

Seeding groups with subgroups

You can seed groups with subgroups that contain milestones/projects/issues with the gitlab:seed:group_seed task:

bin/rake "gitlab:seed:group_seed[subgroup_depth, username]"

Group are additionally seeded with epics if GitLab instance has epics feature available.

Seeding a runner fleet test environment

Use the gitlab:seed:runner_fleet task to seed a full runner fleet, specifically groups with subgroups and projects that contain runners and pipelines:

bin/rake "gitlab:seed:runner_fleet[username, registration_prefix, runner_count, job_count]"

By default, the Rake task uses the root username to create 40 runners and 400 jobs.

Seeding custom metrics for the monitoring dashboard

A lot of different types of metrics are supported in the monitoring dashboard.

To import these metrics, you can run:

bundle exec rake 'gitlab:seed:development_metrics[your_project_id]'

Seed a project with vulnerabilities

You can seed a project with security vulnerabilities.

# Seed all projects
bin/rake 'gitlab:seed:vulnerabilities'

# Seed a specific project
bin/rake 'gitlab:seed:vulnerabilities[group-path/project-path]'

Seed a project with environments

You can seed a project with environments.

By default, this creates 10 environments, each with the prefix ENV_. Only project_path is required to run this command.

bundle exec rake "gitlab:seed:project_environments[project_path, seed_count, prefix]"

# Examples
bundle exec rake "gitlab:seed:project_environments[flightjs/Flight]"
bundle exec rake "gitlab:seed:project_environments[flightjs/Flight, 25, FLIGHT_ENV_]"

Seed a group with dependencies

bundle exec rake gitlab:seed:dependencies

Seed CI variables

You can seed a project, group, or instance with CI variables.

By default, each command creates 10 CI variables. Variable names are prepended with its own default prefix (VAR_ for project-level variables, GROUP_VAR_ for group-level variables, and INSTANCE_VAR_ for instance-level variables).

Instance-level variables do not have environment scopes. Project-level and group-level variables use the default "*" environment scope if no environment_scope is supplied. If environment_scope is set to "unique", each variable is created with its own unique environment.

# Seed a project with project-level CI variables
# Only `project_path` is required to run this command.
bundle exec rake "gitlab:seed:ci_variables_project[project_path, seed_count, environment_scope, prefix]"

# Seed a group with group-level CI variables
# Only `group_name` is required to run this command.
bundle exec rake "gitlab:seed:ci_variables_group[group_name, seed_count, environment_scope, prefix]"

# Seed an instance with instance-level CI variables
bundle exec rake "gitlab:seed:ci_variables_instance[seed_count, prefix]"

# Examples
bundle exec rake "gitlab:seed:ci_variables_project[flightjs/Flight]"
bundle exec rake "gitlab:seed:ci_variables_project[flightjs/Flight, 25, staging]"
bundle exec rake "gitlab:seed:ci_variables_project[flightjs/Flight, 25, unique, CI_VAR_]"

bundle exec rake "gitlab:seed:ci_variables_group[group_name]"
bundle exec rake "gitlab:seed:ci_variables_group[group_name, 25, staging]"
bundle exec rake "gitlab:seed:ci_variables_group[group_name, 25, unique, CI_VAR_]"

bundle exec rake "gitlab:seed:ci_variables_instance"
bundle exec rake "gitlab:seed:ci_variables_instance[25, CI_VAR_]"

Seed a project for merge train development

Seeds a project with merge trains configured and 20 merge requests(each with 3 commits). The command:

rake gitlab:seed:merge_trains:project

Automation

If you’re very sure that you want to wipe the current database and refill seeds, you can set the FORCE environment variable to yes:

FORCE=yes bundle exec rake setup

This skips the action confirmation/safety check, saving you from answering yes manually.

Discard stdout

Since the script would print a lot of information, it could be slowing down your terminal, and it would generate more than 20G logs if you just redirect it to a file. If we don’t care about the output, we could just redirect it to /dev/null:

echo 'yes' | bundle exec rake setup > /dev/null

Because you can’t see the questions from stdout, you might just want to echo 'yes' to keep it running. It would still print the errors on stderr so no worries about missing errors.

Extra Project seed options

There are a few environment flags you can pass to change how projects are seeded

• SIZE: defaults to 8, max: 32. Amount of projects to create.
• LARGE_PROJECTS: defaults to false. If set, clones 6 large projects to help with testing.
• FORK: defaults to false. If set to true, forks torvalds/linux five times. Can also be set to an existing project full_path to fork that instead.

Run tests

To run the test you can use the following commands:

• bin/rake spec to run the RSpec suite
• bin/rake spec:unit to run only the unit tests
• bin/rake spec:integration to run only the integration tests
• bin/rake spec:system to run only the system tests

bin/rake spec takes significant time to pass. Instead of running the full test suite locally, you can save a lot of time by running a single test or directory related to your changes. After you submit a merge request, CI runs full test suite for you. Green CI status in the merge request means full test suite is passed.

You can’t run rspec . since this tries to run all the _spec.rb files it can find, also the ones in /tmp

You can pass RSpec command line options to the spec:unit, spec:integration, and spec:system tasks. For example, bin/rake "spec:unit[--tag ~geo --dry-run]".

For an RSpec test, to run a single test file you can run:

bin/rspec spec/controllers/commit_controller_spec.rb

To run several tests inside one directory:

• bin/rspec spec/requests/api/ for the RSpec tests if you want to test API only

Run RSpec tests which failed in merge request pipeline on your machine

If your merge request pipeline failed with RSpec test failures, you can run all the failed tests on your machine with the following Rake task:

bin/rake spec:merge_request_rspec_failure

There are a few caveats for this Rake task:

• You need to be on the same branch on your machine as the source branch of the merge request.
• The pipeline must have been completed.
• You may need to wait for the test report to be parsed and retry again.

This Rake task depends on the unit test reports feature, which only gets parsed when it is requested for the first time.

Speed up tests, Rake tasks, and migrations

Spring is a Rails application pre-loader. It speeds up development by keeping your application running in the background so you don’t need to boot it every time you run a test, Rake task or migration.

If you want to use it, you must export the ENABLE_SPRING environment variable to 1:

export ENABLE_SPRING=1

Alternatively you can use the following on each spec run,

bundle exec spring rspec some_spec.rb

RuboCop tasks

Generate initial RuboCop TODO list

One way to generate the initial list is to run the Rake task rubocop:todo:generate:

bundle exec rake rubocop:todo:generate

To generate TODO list for specific RuboCop rules, pass them comma-separated as argument to the Rake task:

bundle exec rake 'rubocop:todo:generate[Gitlab/NamespacedClass,Lint/Syntax]'
bundle exec rake rubocop:todo:generate\[Gitlab/NamespacedClass,Lint/Syntax\]

Some shells require brackets to be escaped or quoted.

See Resolving RuboCop exceptions on how to proceed from here.

Run RuboCop in graceful mode

You can run RuboCop in “graceful mode”. This means all enabled cop rules are silenced which have “grace period” activated (via Details: grace period).

Run:

bundle exec rake 'rubocop:check:graceful'
bundle exec rake 'rubocop:check:graceful[Gitlab/NamespacedClass]'

Compile Frontend Assets

You shouldn’t ever need to compile frontend assets manually in development, but if you ever need to test how the assets get compiled in a production environment you can do so with the following command:

RAILS_ENV=production NODE_ENV=production bundle exec rake gitlab:assets:compile

This compiles and minifies all JavaScript and CSS assets and copy them along with all other frontend assets (images, fonts, etc) into /public/assets where they can be easily inspected.

Emoji tasks

To update the Emoji aliases file (used for Emoji autocomplete), run the following:

bundle exec rake tanuki_emoji:aliases

To import the fallback Emoji images, run the following:

bundle exec rake tanuki_emoji:import

To update the Emoji digests file (used for Emoji autocomplete) based on the currently available Emoji, run the following:

bundle exec rake tanuki_emoji:digests

To generate a sprite file containing all the Emoji, run:

bundle exec rake tanuki_emoji:sprite

See How to update Emojis for detailed instructions.

Update project templates

See contributing to project templates for GitLab team members.

Generate route lists

To see the full list of API routes, you can run:

bundle exec rake grape:path_helpers

The generated list includes a full list of API endpoints and functional RESTful API verbs.

For the Rails controllers, run:

bundle exec rails routes

Since these take some time to create, it’s often helpful to save the output to a file for quick reference.

Show obsolete ignored_columns

To see a list of all obsolete ignored_columns definitions run:

bundle exec rake db:obsolete_ignored_columns

Feel free to remove their definitions from their ignored_columns definitions.

Validate GraphQL queries

To check the validity of one or more of our front-end GraphQL queries, run:

# Validate all queries
bundle exec rake gitlab:graphql:validate
# Validate one query
bundle exec rake gitlab:graphql:validate[path/to/query.graphql]
# Validate a directory
bundle exec rake gitlab:graphql:validate[path/to/queries]

This prints out a report with an entry for each query, explaining why each query is invalid if it fails to pass validation.

We strip out @client fields during validation so it is important to mark client fields with the @client directive to avoid false positives.

Analyze GraphQL queries

Analogous to ANALYZE in SQL, we can run gitlab:graphql:analyze to estimate the of the cost of running a query.

Usage:

# Analyze all queries
bundle exec rake gitlab:graphql:analyze
# Analyze one query
bundle exec rake gitlab:graphql:analyze[path/to/query.graphql]
# Analyze a directory
bundle exec rake gitlab:graphql:analyze[path/to/queries]

This prints out a report for each query, including the complexity of the query if it is valid.

The complexity depends on the arguments in some cases, so the reported complexity is a best-effort assessment of the upper bound.

Update GraphQL documentation and schema definitions

To generate GraphQL documentation based on the GitLab schema, run:

bundle exec rake gitlab:graphql:compile_docs

In its current state, the Rake task:

• Generates output for GraphQL objects.
• Places the output at doc/api/graphql/reference/index.md.

This uses some features from graphql-docs gem like its schema parser and helper methods. The docs generator code comes from our side giving us more flexibility, like using Haml templates and generating Markdown files.

To edit the content, you may need to edit the following:

• The template. You can edit the template at tooling/graphql/docs/templates/default.md.haml. The actual renderer is at Tooling::Graphql::Docs::Renderer.
• The applicable description field in the code, which Updates machine-readable schema files, which is then used by the rake task described earlier.

@parsed_schema is an instance variable that the graphql-docs gem expects to have available. Gitlab::Graphql::Docs::Helper defines the object method we use. This is also where you should implement any new methods for new types you’d like to display.

Update machine-readable schema files

To generate GraphQL schema files based on the GitLab schema, run:

bundle exec rake gitlab:graphql:schema:dump

This uses GraphQL Ruby’s built-in Rake tasks to generate files in both IDL and JSON formats.

Update documentation and schema definitions

The following command combines the intent of Update GraphQL documentation and schema definitions and Update machine-readable schema files:

bundle exec rake gitlab:graphql:update_all

Update audit event types documentation

For information on updating audit event types documentation, see Generate documentation.

Update OpenAPI client for Error Tracking feature

To update generated code for OpenAPI client located in gems/error_tracking_open_api run the following commands:

# Run rake task
bundle exec rake gems:error_tracking_open_api:generate

# Review and test the changes

# Commit the changes
git commit -m 'Update ErrorTrackingOpenAPI from OpenAPI definition' gems/error_tracking_open_api

Update banned SSH keys

You can add banned SSH keys from any Git repository by using the gitlab:security:update_banned_ssh_keys Rake task:

1. Find a public remote Git repository containing SSH public keys. The public key files must have the .pub file extension.
2. Make sure that /tmp/ directory has enough space to store the remote Git repository.

3. To add the SSH keys to your banned-key list, run this command, replacing GIT_URL and OUTPUT_FILE with appropriate values:

   # @param git_url - Remote Git URL.
   # @param output_file - Update keys to an output file. Default is config/security/banned_ssh_keys.yml.
   
   bundle exec rake "gitlab:security:update_banned_ssh_keys[GIT_URL, OUTPUT_FILE]"
   

This task clones the remote repository, recursively walks the file system looking for files ending in .pub, parses those files as SSH public keys, and then adds the public key fingerprints to output_file. The contents of config/security/banned_ssh_keys.yml is read by GitLab and kept in memory. It is not recommended to increase the size of this file beyond 1 megabyte in size.

Output current navigation structure to YAML

This task relies on your current environment setup (licensing, feature flags, projects/groups), so output may vary from run-to-run or environment-to-environment. We may look to standardize output in a future iteration.

Product, UX, and tech writing need a way to audit the entire GitLab navigation, yet may not be comfortable directly reviewing the code in lib/sidebars. You can dump the entire nav structure to YAML via the gitlab:nav:dump_structure Rake task:

bundle exec rake gitlab:nav:dump_structure