Gerrit OWNERS Plugin

This repository comprises of effectively two separate plugins, owners and owners-autoassign.

They share the ability to parse the same OWNERS file format, which facilitates the maintenance of ACLs, as there is only one source of truth.

For details on how to configure either plugin, please refer to the docs in the specific plugin's folder.

NOTE: A comprehensive introduction to both owners and owners-autoassign has been given as part of the GerritMeets series in Jan 2025.

Here's an introduction to both plugins:

owners

This plugin exposes the has:approval_owners predicate that can be used with Gerrit's own submit-requirements to ensure that a change has been approved by the relevant users defined in the OWNERS file for the target branch of the change.

This allows the creation of a single repository with multiple nested projects, each potentially, used by different users/teams with different roles depending on the particular path where changes are being proposed. A user can be “owner” in a specific directory, thus influencing the approvals of changes there, but not in others, enabling great flexibility when working on repositories shared by multiple teams.

owners-autoassign

This plugin parses the same OWNERS file format as the owners plugin. It will automatically assign all of the owners as reviewers to newly created or updated changes. It also allows for completely custom management of the attention set, i.e. allows, via custom integrations, to not add people on holiday to the attention set, or that the same user is not added to too many changes at the same time, etc...

Building the plugins

This plugin is built with Bazel and two build modes are supported:

• Standalone
• In Gerrit tree

Build standalone

To build the plugin, issue the following command:

  bazel build :all

The output is created in

  bazel-bin/owners/owners.jar
  bazel-bin/owners-autoassign/owners-autoassign.jar
  bazel-bin/owners-api/owners-api.jar

To execute the tests run:

  bazel test //...

This project can be imported into the Eclipse IDE:

  ./tools/eclipse/project.sh

Build in Gerrit tree

Create symbolic links of the owners and owners-autoassign folders and of the external_plugin_deps.bzl file to the Gerrit source code /plugins directory.

Create a symbolic link of the owners-common plugin to the Gerrit source code directory.

Then build the owners and owners-autoassign plugins with the usual Gerrit plugin compile command.

Example:

   $ git clone https://gerrit.googlesource.com/plugins/owners
   $ git clone https://gerrit.googlesource.com/gerrit
   $ cd gerrit/plugins
   $ ln -s ../../owners/owners .
   $ ln -s ../../owners/owners-autoassign .
   $ ln -s ../../owners/owners-api .
   $ ln -sf ../../owners/external_plugin_deps.bzl .
   $ cd ..
   $ ln -s ../owners/owners-common .
   $ bazel build plugins/owners plugins/owners-autoassign

NOTE: the owners-common folder is producing shared artifacts for the two plugins and does not need to be built separately being a direct dependency of the build process. Its resulting .jar must not be installed in gerrit plugins directory.

The output is created in

  bazel-bin/plugins/owners/owners.jar
  bazel-bin/plugins/owners-autoassign/owners-autoassign.jar

To execute the tests run:

  bazel test owners-common:test

This project can be imported into the Eclipse IDE:

Add the plugin name to the CUSTOM_PLUGINS (and in case when you want to run tests from the IDE to CUSTOM_PLUGINS_TEST_DEPS) in Gerrit core in tools/bzl/plugins.bzl file and run:

  ./tools/eclipse/project.py