The Twelve Days of Integrations: GitLab

It’s that time of year again, though it may not quite feel it. The Google Doodles are all festive in some way, department stores are playing Michael Buble songs on a loop to almost entirely empty rooms, and I'm wearing the most garish sweater I own because no one can judge me for it for an entire month.

To celebrate, Shortcut is highlighting twelve of our integrations with a detailed write up alongside their own little digital snow globes. We hope you return every day to enjoy these posts alongside your tinglers and fuzzles, your dafflers and wuzzles, and your delicious pot (or Beyond meat) roasts.

Our seventh featured integration is GitLab.

On the Seventh Day of Integrations, Shortcut gives to you a GitLab in a blog post. We'd give you seven of them, but there's only the one.

As we noted in a previous post: different kinds of engineers have brought their work to the public by using a rich variety of methods.

Civil engineers who built the Brooklyn Bridge did so via a “pull request” between Manhattan and Brooklyn involving the work of hundreds of people armed with jackhammers and cranes and almost certainly a big pizza pie (never mind that Lombardi's opened 20 years after the bridge was built).

The chemical engineers who created Windex did a “code review” by aggressively cleaning a bunch of bugs off their windshield after a drive up the New Jersey Turnpike in the Windex-mobile. I’d ask that you not fact check the existence of this vehicle or if it has ever been driven in the state of NJ.

The mechanical engineers who built the Nintendo Wii “pushed” their creation out after an awful lot of soldering (probably? I mean, I’m not a mechanical engineer) and a lot more time complaining to each other on AIM about the quality of the code that had been written by their co-creators: the software engineers.

And those software engineers now, for the most part, manage all their work via distributed Version Control Systems. One such VCS has been gaining in popularity: GitLab.

This lab for experimenting on all the code in your git repositories likely needs little in the way of introduction. But something that does need an introduction? Our integration with it.

How does it work?  

Our integration with GitLab allows you to use specially formatted commit messages to link Shortcut Stories to commits, branches and pull requests, as well as to update those Stories and move them across your workflow.

You're also able to take some actions in reverse, opening PRs for associated branches from within Shortcut, as well as viewing commit messages and other information within the Story itself.

And you can use Event Handlers to allow VCS events to automatically change Story Workflow states without you needing to do anything extra to trigger the change.

The integration includes a ton of functionality, but at its core is simply about making it as simple as possible to make your Shortcut workflow a more seamless part of your development process.

Watch this video to see some of the newest features we've added to GitLab and other VCS integrations:

An overview of the newest features in our GitLab (and other) VCS integrations

To learn how to install the GitLab integration, visit our set up a VCS integration article.

Once it's installed, go here to learn how to use Branches and Pull Requests with Stories. This article also details how to setup event handlers so that VCS events will change Story Workflow states.

Then go here to see how to use Commits and Commit Messages.

You can dive into as much detail as you like with this (and other VCS) integrations by visiting the VCS section our Integrations documentation.

Shortcut is pretty cool. GitLab is pretty cool. Both of them together? Very cool, much like this wintery month of December.