GitLab gets native with Sourcegraph code review in upcoming release

GitLab gets native with Sourcegraph code review in upcoming release
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GitLab has promised “native code intelligence” and review in its next release, courtesy of an integration with Sourcegraph.

The devseceverythingops vendor said the integration had been a year in the making, after CEO Sid Sijbrandij floated a proposal to integrate GitLab with Sourcegraph to provide “advanced code navigation and cross-referencing functionality for source code we host”.

Sijbrandij’s pipeline dream came shortly after Sourcegraph open-sourced its core software, including Chrome and Firefox extensions, under the Apache 2 license. At the time, it could be integrated with third party tools via an API – though a GitLab supporting browser extension was also available.

Now, as of November 22’s release of GitLab 12.5, “We aim to provide code intelligence and code navigation functionality in this integration which was historically provided by the Sourcegraph’s browser extension. Now that we built this integration the browser extension is no longer needed to provide this functionality.”

According to Sourcegraph, the collaboration will deliver “hover tooltips [to] provide access to go-to-definition and find references in the browser on their code host”.

At the same time, it said, the browser extensions will continue to be offered, and “Developers using the browser extension can additionally enjoy these features on GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket server, Phabricator, and more, making their workflow comprehensive anywhere they view code.”

The blog announcing the move said GitLab had already been using the integration internally on its own source code store. “Over time, we aim to roll out Sourcegraph capabilities across code views within projects to all public projects on GitLab.com.”

But, it added, “Users will still require the browser extension configured to a private instance of Sourcegraph for private projects on GitLab.com.”

Likewise, “If you’re self-managing your GitLab EE deployment and would like to enable Sourcegraph code intelligence, you must have a private Sourcegraph instance running as an external service. This is required because Sourcegraph.com does not index any private code for privacy and security reasons.”