Troubleshooting Code Owners

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When working with Code Owners, you might encounter the following issues.

For more information about how the Code Owners feature handles errors, see the Code Owners reference.

Approvals shown as optional

A Code Owner approval rule is optional if any of these conditions are true:

Approvals do not show

The CODEOWNERS file must be present in the target branch before the merge request is created.

Code Owner approval rules only update when the merge request is created. If you update the CODEOWNERS file, close the merge request and create a new one.

User not shown as possible approver

A user might not show as an approver on the Code Owner merge request approval rules if any of these conditions are true:

  • A rule prevents the specific user from approving the merge request. Check the project merge request approval settings.
  • A Code Owner group has a visibility of private, and the current user is not a member of the Code Owner group.
  • The specific username is spelled incorrectly or malformed in the CODEOWNERS file.
  • Current user is an external user who does not have permission to the internal Code Owner group.

Approval rule is invalid

You might get an error that states: 

Approval rule is invalid.
GitLab has approved this rule automatically to unblock the merge request.

This issue occurs when an approval rule uses a Code Owner that is not a direct member of the project.

The workaround is to check that the group or user has been invited to the project.

User or group not shown when viewing Code Owners for a directory

Code Owners might not show the intended user or group based on your configured rules when viewing a directory, but correctly show the Code Owners for files beneath the directory.

For example: 

* @dev-team
docs/ @tech-writer-team

All files beneath the docs/ directory show @tech-writer-team as Code Owners, but the directory itself shows @dev-team.

This behavior occurs when viewing a directory because the syntax rule applies to all files beneath the directory, which does not include the directory itself. To resolve this, update the CODEOWNERS file to include the directory specifically along with all files beneath the directory. For example: 

* @dev-team
docs @tech-writer-team
docs/ @tech-writer-team