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Comment by jeena | Hacker News Reader

I was in the team where we decided what to use to serve git repos + to do peer reviews for a big German car manufacturer. We decided on GitLab because it had a normal fork-workflow but was open source and we wanted to divert some of the money into one of the open source projects. Now we have around 600 users in that project.

Most of the things work great but we have the problem that we want to use Jenkins instead of the build in CI/CD solution but the only way to trigger MR jobs from GitLab forks in Jenkins is this non maintained plugin which has been in alpha since we started two years ago https://github.com/Argelbargel/gitlab-branch-source-plugin

So I wonder, what is the reason behind not investing into integrations with other CI systems like Jenkins which are hugely popular and used by so many people?

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We are investing continually to have integrations with tools such as Jenkins, GitHub, and JIRA.

I'm not sure why https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/integration/jenkins.html apparently doesn't support forks and our CI people to comment here.

In the meantime before someone from CI jumps in, here's the issue that has some more information relevant to your question: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/58301

Hey there, PM for CI/CD here. Can you point me to an issue in either GitLab or the Jenkins Plugin repo that has more info specifically on what you're looking to do that isn't possible today? Or share specifically what you need here so I can make one? That other project seems to have a few different features and I'm not sure which use cases exactly are important for you.

In any case, we definitely want to make sure you have the right functionalities you need.

Basically what we need is functionality which makes it possible to do:

- there is a canonical git repo for a component

- a dev doesn't have write access to it

- they fork it into their own private user name space

- they change it and create a merge request for the canonical git repo for one of the branches

- the merge request creates (or triggers) a job in Jenkins => this is where our research showed that only the unmaintained gitlab-branch-source-plugin plugin can do that https://github.com/Argelbargel/gitlab-branch-source-plugin

- Jenkins builds it and reports the status back to GitLab

- If it created a new job that job is removed after the MR gets merged.

It would be nice if, like the other plugin does it one could have it's own job for this MR with it's own history but I guess we could live also with a shared history if you could have the MR buld history in GitLab only.

update: I forgot to write that we use Jenkinsfile based pipelines, not sure if this is important.

Thanks for the super clear description! Doing some internal research on this.

I've created https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/64995 - please join us in the conversation there.

Why would you want to use Jenkins? Genuinely curious.

Jenkins has been nothing short of the devil for me.

Mostly historical reasons.

I'm interested in learning more about car manufacturer and software - wondering if you'd be open for some questions?

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