Guardrails / gitlab

A required section covers everything

gitlab/codeowners-catch-all@v1

A section whose approval is required declares a rule matching every path, so a file nobody thought about still has an owner who has to approve it.

Id	gitlab/codeowners-catch-all
Version	v1
Category	gitlab
Default severity	warning
Interpreter	python3
Timeout	30 seconds
Violations tolerated	0
Collects	gitlab

Collectors

This guardrail gathers nothing itself. It depends on the collectors below, which the CLI runs once per build before any check, and reads what they found out of GUARDRAIL_FACTS. A collector that collects nothing skips this guardrail rather than failing it.

Collector	Gathers	Inputs it is given
gitlab	What GitLab itself reads out of the repository: the .gitlab-ci.yml, read as GitLab writes it, and the CODEOWNERS file, read as sections of rules. For the pipeline, the stages it declares, what it includes, and for every job the stage it sits in, the image and runner tags it asks for, how long it may run, the rules that decide whether it runs at all, and each script section with the variables it interpolates. For CODEOWNERS, every section with whether it is optional and how many approvals it needs, the rules under each, and the owners that apply to the paths a guardrail asks about, resolved per section the way GitLab resolves them. Names and shapes only, never a secret, a variable value or an environment value.	pipelines

The inputs above are this guardrail's own, passed straight through. Configuring one in buildnote.json changes what is collected, and two guardrails configured the same way share the one collection.

Configuration

{
  "guardrails": {
      "failOn": "error",
      "comment": true,
      "checks": [
          {
              "use": "gitlab/codeowners-catch-all@v1",
              "severity": "warning",
              "with": {
                  "pipelines": ".gitlab-ci.yml,.gitlab-ci.yaml",
                  "patterns": "*,**,/*"
              },
              "exemptions": []
          }
      ]
  }
}

Inputs

Input	Description	Default	Environment variable
pipelines	Comma separated globs naming the GitLab CI files to read.	.gitlab-ci.yml,.gitlab-ci.yaml	GUARDRAIL_INPUT_PIPELINES
patterns	Comma separated patterns, any one of which counts as matching every path.	*,**,/*	GUARDRAIL_INPUT_PATTERNS

How to fix

Give one required section a catch-all as its first rule, then narrow it below:

* @acme/platform

[Backend][2] @acme/backend
/api/

GitLab resolves ownership once per section, so a catch-all covers only the section it sits in. A file no section names is owned by nobody, and the gap is invisible until a merge request lands in it.

A catch-all in an optional section does not close the gap. An optional section is written ^[Name], its owners are shown on the merge request, and their approval is never required, so the change can merge with nobody having looked at it.

More in gitlab

• gitlab/codeowners-no-unowned-rules. No rule in CODEOWNERS ends up with an empty set of owners, counting the default owners its section header hands down, so no section claims a path it names nobody for.
• gitlab/codeowners-owners-per-rule. Every rule in CODEOWNERS ends up with at least the minimum owners and no more than the maximum, counting the default owners its section header hands down, so review is neither one person's bus factor nor everybody's problem.
• gitlab/codeowners-parses. Every line of CODEOWNERS that is not a comment reads either as a section header or as a rule, so no ownership is silently lost to a line GitLab ignores.
• gitlab/codeowners-present. The project carries a CODEOWNERS file in one of the three places GitLab reads one from, and at least one section of it declares a rule, so every change has somebody to review it.
• gitlab/codeowners-team-owned. Every rule in CODEOWNERS ends up owned by at least one GitLab group, so ownership survives the people currently in it.
• gitlab/job-timeout-set. Every job declares how long it may run, so a hung job is cut off rather than holding a runner until the project's own limit.

All 7 gitlab guardrails