• Overview
• Use cases
• Editing approvals
• Editing approvals
• Multiple approval rules
• Eligible approvers
  • Implicit approvers
• Adding or removing an approval
• Code Owners approvals
• Overriding the merge request approvals default settings
• Overriding merge request approvals default settings
• Resetting approvals on push
• Allowing merge request authors to approve their own merge requests
• Prevent approval of merge requests by their committers
• Merge requests with different source branch and target branch projects
• Approver suggestions
• Filtering merge requests by approvers

Merge request approvals

Introduced in GitLab Enterprise Edition 7.12.

Use these commands to start the Rails console:

# Omnibus GitLab
gitlab-rails console

# Installation from source
cd /home/git/gitlab
sudo -u git -H bin/rails console RAILS_ENV=production

Then run Feature.enable(:approval_rules) to enable the feature flag.

The documentation for the older interface can be accessed here.

Overview

Merge request approvals enable enforced code review by requiring specified people to approve a merge request before it can be unblocked for merging.

Use cases

1. Enforcing review of all code that gets merged into a repository.
2. Specifying code maintainers for an entire repository.
3. Specifying reviewers for a given proposed code change.
4. Specifying categories of reviewers, such as BE, FE, QA, DB, etc., for all proposed code changes.

Editing approvals

To edit the merge request approvals:

1. Navigate to your project’s Settings > General and expand Merge request approvals.

   

2. Click Edit.
3. Search for users or groups that will be eligible to approve merge requests and click the Add button to add them as approvers. Note: selecting approvers is optional.
4. Set the minimum number of required approvals under the No. approvals required box. Note: the minimum can be 0.

5. Click Update approvers.

   

The steps above are the minimum required to get approvals working in your merge requests, but there are a couple more options available that might be suitable to your workflow:

• Choose whether the default settings can be overridden per merge request
• Choose whether approvals will be reset with new pushed commits

Editing approvals

Introduced in GitLab Premium 11.8.

For GitLab Premium, multiple approver rules can be configured. To configure the merge request approval rules:

1. Navigate to your project’s Settings > General and expand Merge request approvals.
2. Click Add approvers to create a new approval rule.
3. Just like in GitLab Starter, select the approval members and aprovals required.
4. Give the approval rule a name that describes the set of approvers selected.

5. Click Add approvers to submit the new rule.

   

Multiple approval rules

Introduced in GitLab Premium 11.8.

For GitLab Premium, a merge request’s overall approval status is determined by a set of rules. Each rule contains:

• A set of eligible approvers.
• A minimum number of approvals required.

When an eligible approver approves a merge request, it will reduce the number of approvals left for all rules that the approver belongs to.

If no approval rules are set, then the overall minimum number of approvals required can be configured. With no approval rules, any eligible approver may approve.

Eligible approvers

The following can approve merge requests:

• Users being added as approvers at project or merge request level.
• Code owners related to the merge request (introduced in GitLab Starter 11.5).

An individual user can be added as an approver for a project if they are a member of:

• The project.
• The project’s immediate parent group.
• A group that has access to the project via a share.

A group can also be added as an approver. In the future, group approvers will be restricted.

If a user is added as an individual approver and is also part of a group approver, then that user is just counted once. The merge request author, as well as users who have committed to the merge request, do not count as eligible approvers, if Prevent author approval (enabled by default) and Prevent committers approval (disabled by default) are enabled on the project settings.

Implicit approvers

If the number of required approvals is greater than the number of approvers, other users will become implicit approvers to fill the gap. Those implicit approvers include members of the given project with Developer role or higher.

Adding or removing an approval

If approvals are activated for the given project, when a user visits an open merge request, depending on their eligibility, one of the following is possible:

• They are not an eligible approver: They cannot do anything with respect to approving this merge request.

• They have not approved this merge request:

  • If the required number of approvals has not been yet met, they can approve it by clicking the displayed Approve button.
  • If the required number of approvals has already been met, they can still approve it by clicking the displayed Approve additionally button.

• They have already approved this merge request: They can remove their approval.

  

For a given merge request, if the approval restrictions have been satisfied, the merge request is unblocked and can be merged. Note, that meeting the required number of approvals is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for unblocking a merge request from being merged. There are other conditions that may block it, such as merge conflicts, pending discussions or a failed CI/CD pipeline.

Code Owners approvals

Introduced in GitLab Premium 11.9.

It is possible to require at least one approval for each entry in the CODEOWNERS file that matches a file changed in the merge request. To enable this feature:

1. Navigate to your project’s Settings > General and expand Merge request approvals.
2. Tick the Require approval from code owners checkbox checkbox.
3. Click Save changes.

When this feature is enabled, all merge requests will need approval from one code owner per matched rule before it can be merged.

Overriding the merge request approvals default settings

Introduced in GitLab Enterprise Edition 9.4.

If approvals are set at the project level, the default configuration (number of required approvals and approvers) can be overridden for each merge request in that project.

One possible scenario would be to to assign a group of approvers at the project level and change them later when creating or editing the merge request.

First, you have to enable this option in the project’s settings:

1. Navigate to your project’s Settings > General and expand Merge request approvals

2. Tick the “Can override approvers and approvals required per merge request” checkbox

   

3. Click Save changes

The default approval settings can now be overridden when creating a merge request or by editing it after it’s been created:

1. Click Edit under the Approvers section.
2. Search for users or groups that will be eligible to approve merge requests and click the Add button to add them as approvers or remove existing approvers that were set in the project’s settings.
3. If you want to change the number of required approvals, set a new number in the No. approvals required box.
4. Click Update approvers.

There are however some restrictions:

• The amount of required approvals, if changed, must be greater than the default set at the project level. This ensures that you’re not forced to adjust settings when someone is unavailable for approval, yet the process is still enforced.

Overriding merge request approvals default settings

In GitLab Premium, when the approval rules are set at the project level, and Can override approvers and approvals required per merge request is checked, there are a few more restrictions (compared to GitLab Starter):

• Approval rules can be added to an MR with no restriction.
• For project sourced approval rules, editing and removing approvers is not allowed.
• The approvals required of all approval rules is configurable, but if a rule is backed by a project rule, then it is restricted to the minimum approvals required set in the project’s corresponding rule.

Resetting approvals on push

If approvals are set at the project level, you can choose whether all approvals on a merge request are removed when new commits are pushed to the source branch of the merge request:

1. Navigate to your project’s Settings > General and expand Merge request approvals

2. Tick the “Remove all approvals in a merge request when new commits are pushed to its source branch” checkbox

   

3. Click Save changes

If you want approvals to persist, independent of changes to the merge request, turn this setting to off by unchecking the box and saving the changes.

Allowing merge request authors to approve their own merge requests

Introduced in GitLab Starter 11.3.

You can allow merge request authors to self-approve merge requests by enabling it at the project level. Authors also need to be included in the approvers list in order to be able to approve their merge request.

1. Navigate to your project’s Settings > General and expand Merge request approvals.
2. Uncheck the Prevent approval of merge requests by merge request author checkbox, which is enabled by default.
3. Click Save changes.

Prevent approval of merge requests by their committers

Introduced in GitLab Starter 11.10.

You can prevent users that have committed to a merge request from approving it by enabling Prevent approval of merge requests by their committers.

1. Navigate to your project’s Settings > General and expand Merge request approvals.
2. Tick the checkbox Prevent approval of merge requests by their committers.
3. Click Save changes.

Merge requests with different source branch and target branch projects

If the merge request source branch and target branch belong to different projects (which happens in merge requests in forked projects), everything is with respect to the target branch’s project (typically the original project). In particular, since the merge request in this case is part of the target branch’s project, the relevant settings are the target project’s. The source branch’s project settings are not applicable. Even if you start the merge request from the source branch’s project UI, pay attention to the created merge request itself. It belongs to the target branch’s project.

Approver suggestions

Approvers are suggested for merge requests based on the previous authors of the files affected by the merge request.

Filtering merge requests by approvers

Introduced in GitLab Starter 11.9.

To filter merge requests by an individual approver, you can type (or select from the dropdown) approver and select the user.