gitlab-warden

Keep your GitLab groups and projects in a declared state, with guardrails and drift correction.

Full documentation lives at intentius.io/gitlab-warden, with deep dives on these pages.

Set up with an agent

From a checkout, Claude Code picks up the skill in .claude/skills/gitlab-warden automatically. Other agents can install it with npx skills add INTENTIUS/gitlab-warden, or by copying the skill directory into ~/.claude/skills/. Then paste this prompt, filling in the placeholders:

Use the gitlab-warden skill to help me set up governance for my GitLab group
<GROUP_PATH> on <GITLAB_URL>. Author a governance.yaml nodes: policy for the
groups and projects I care about (ask me which slices matter), then run a
dry-run reconcile and walk me through the plan. Do not apply anything.

The skill holds the agent to dry-run until you've reviewed the plan; deletes stay off entirely until you mark a node owned in the policy.

What you need

A clone of this repo (git clone https://github.com/INTENTIUS/gitlab-warden). The agent skill, the policy examples, and the CI templates live in it, and setup ends with a warden pipeline in your group, so you'll have the repo anyway.
A GitLab personal access token with api scope: Owner on the groups you'll govern and Maintainer or above on projects (the setup guide walks through creating one).
Node 22+.

About ten minutes gets you to a first dry-run plan. The quickest probe needs no clone at all:

# Dry-run: reads only, prints a plan, changes nothing.
npx @intentius/gitlab-warden reconcile --config governance.yaml --token-env GITLAB_TOKEN --mode dry-run

The npm package is also what your pipeline installs later (the CI guide). Add --base-url for self-managed (defaults to gitlab.com). Full config + flags in Usage below.

Teams moving off GitHub Actions can start with gitlab-warden migrate .github/workflows/, which translates the existing workflows into a stitched .gitlab-ci.yml (the migration guide).

What it is

You declare desired state in YAML (selective-by-omission: an absent field is never read, diffed, or touched); warden diffs it against the live GitLab API and, in apply mode, converges it, guarded so a typo can't mass-delete.

It's a single binary + a YAML file in CI: no state file, no HCL, no provider toolchain to stand up. The point is governance-as-code without the weight, covering the full GitLab governance surface in one place.

Warden is stateless. It diffs against live state and reconciles, so there is nothing to drift or import and no lock to hold, and correction is continuous: a reconcile loop keeps running rather than applying once. Declarations are selective-by-omission with ownership-gated deletes, which lets you manage a slice of a large instance without claiming the rest. Dry-run is the default mode, and a removal cap guards the apply path. Premium/Ultimate endpoints that 403 on read are tolerated and skipped, never fatal.

Flagship: push-rule drift

GitLab push rules aren't version-controlled, and their inheritance is broken: rules are copied at project creation and never propagated, so a changed group rule never reaches existing projects (each one gets fixed by hand). A reconcile loop that re-asserts declared push rules across a whole group tree fixes that continuously, and it is one clear example of the model warden applies across the entire governance surface.

Coverage (the full surface)

Scope	Cycles
Group	settings · members · subgroup/project provisioning · variables · webhooks · push rules · deploy tokens · access tokens · protected environments · integrations · compliance frameworks · security policies · member roles
Project	settings · members · protected branches · protected tags · protected environments · push rules · MR approvals · variables · webhooks · integrations · deploy keys/tokens · access tokens · advanced protections (job-token scope) · security policy attachment
Instance (self-managed)	application settings · instance CI/CD variables · system hooks · custom member roles

REST for most of it; GraphQL for the few surfaces that require it (compliance frameworks, security-policy attachment). The Ultimate-only GraphQL cycles are best-effort (unvalidated against a live Ultimate instance; the e2e runs CE).

Usage

npx @intentius/gitlab-warden reconcile \
  --config governance.yaml \
  --mode dry-run \
  --token-env GITLAB_TOKEN \
  --base-url https://gitlab.example.com   # omit for gitlab.com

# governance.yaml — declared nodes, keyed by full path
nodes:
  acme/platform:
    kind: group
    groupSettings: { description: "Platform team", visibility: private }
    members:
      - { user: alice, accessLevel: owner }
    pushRules: { preventSecrets: true }
  acme/platform/api:
    kind: project
    projectSettings: { mergeMethod: ff, topics: [go, service] }
    protectedBranches:
      - { name: main, pushAccessLevel: 40, mergeAccessLevel: 30 }

--mode dry-run (default) prints the plan; --mode apply converges it, with the per-collection removal cap bounding deletes per apply (see POLICY.md) and tier-gated endpoints handled as described above.

Tests

npm test runs the unit suite (mock-client, fully offline). The e2e smoke suite is fully hermetic. It stands up GitLab CE via Docker Compose and provisions its own group, project, and users with no external account or secrets. It exercises every cycle's read path (asserting it stays read-only) and, behind an opt-in flag, a full apply smoke. Every CE-supported cycle applies a policy and then re-converges to an empty plan; out-of-band drift gets corrected on the next run, and nodes declaring owned perform a real delete. Tier-gated cycles assert graceful degradation instead. The cycle-by-cycle table lives in e2e/README.md.

eval "$(npm run --silent e2e:up)"   # compose up + mint token (GitLab CE is slow)
GITLAB_E2E_APPLY=1 npm run test:e2e:run
npm run e2e:down

Inheritance-aware membership

GitLab is a tree of nested groups with inherited membership rather than a flat org. Membership is diffed against direct members (/members); the effective roster (/members/all) is never consulted. An inherited member is never treated as deletable drift (the DELETE would fail, since the grant lives at an ancestor). The scope and inheritance model documents the rules the membership cycle follows.

How it relates to the sibling wardens

This is the third warden built on the shared provider-agnostic reconcile primitive in @intentius/chant/reconcile. That core also powers github-warden and forgejo-warden. gitlab-warden supplies the GitLab layer: a REST + GraphQL client with a configurable host (self-managed or GitLab.com), the config and live-state types, and the reconcile cycles with their GitLab diff().

	github-warden	forgejo-warden	gitlab-warden
Hierarchy	flat org → repo	flat org → repo	nested groups → projects
Membership	direct	team-driven	direct + inherited
Auth	GitHub App	token, self-hosted	token, self-managed + SaaS
API	REST	REST	REST + GraphQL
Reconcile core	`@intentius/chant/reconcile`	(same)	(same)