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I don't think I'm really understanding how Gerrit can fit into my group's existing workflow. Is Gerrit intended to be the central "hub" of code? I have been imagining it as similar to Atlassian's Crucible, which fits in with Atlassian's Stash or Bitbucker.

My group currently uses a very active Gitlab installation but the built-in code review facility is lacking, and I absolutely must inspect code from contractors going into the repo.

I need a behind-the-firewall solution, and cost is a big consideration. I have heard positive things about Gerrit, but not really an explanation of how it can fit into an existing process. I also like that it seems to have pretty good eclipse integration.

Can someone help me out?

Matt Thompson
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1 Answers1

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Gerrit expects to "own" the repositories you use it with, i.e. it expects the git directories to be present in a mounted file system. If you want it to interact with GitLab (or GitHub) you can set up one way replication from Gerrit to GitLab so that changes made in Gerrit will be pushed to GitLab within a few seconds. For GitHub there's a Gerrit GitHub plugin to help with this.

You can continue to use the other features of GitLab but if you don't lock down the repositories (or at least block pushes into branches that Gerrit manages) you'll end up in trouble the next time Gerrit attempts to replicate to the GitLab repository.

So... Gerrit does replace GitLab's repository management and code review facilities but doesn't contain an issue tracker, wiki, or similar.

Magnus Bäck
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  • This sounds like a pretty decent compromised to me - access to Gerrit for my small team, but visibility in the company-wide repository. Maybe this should be a separate question, but does Gerrit have to use a mounted file system? I'm using Azure which has the nasty habit of occasionally resizing mounted drives and wiping them at the same time. Gave our admins a heart-attack the first time it happened. – Matt Thompson Sep 17 '14 at 17:10
  • Yes, it needs to be a mounted file system that Gerrit has direct file system access to. Well, at least if we're talking about out of the box support. JGit, the underlying software that accesses the gits, does support alternative backends. Google uses this to store the gits on their distributed infrastructure. – Magnus Bäck Sep 18 '14 at 05:34