GitLab Dashboard

GitLab Dashboard is a Ruby-based application designed to provide an intuitive and comprehensive dashboard for managing GitLab merge requests.

Table of Contents

• Features
• Installation
• Usage
• Container secrets
• Observability
• License

Features

• Visualize GitLab merge requests, review progress, and deployment progress.

Installation

Prerequisites

• Ruby version: 4.0.0 or higher
• System dependencies: Ensure you have Git and Node.js installed

Setup

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/pedropombeiro/gitlab-dashboard.git
   cd gitlab-dashboard

2. Install dependencies:

   bundle install
   npm install

   or, using mise:

   mise run install

3. Create and initialize the database:

   rails db:create
   rails db:migrate
   rails db:seed

Usage

Run the application locally:

bin/dev

Access the application at http://localhost:3000.

Container secrets

The container image (ghcr.io/pedropombeiro/gitlab-dashboard) reads configuration from environment variables, such as DATABASE_URL, RAILS_MASTER_KEY, GITLAB_TOKEN, and HONEYBADGER_API_KEY. To keep secrets out of docker inspect, you can store any of these variables in a file instead. Set NAME_FILE to the file's path, and the image exports the file contents as NAME. This is the same convention that the official Postgres image uses, and it works with Docker Compose secrets:

services:
  webserver:
    image: ghcr.io/pedropombeiro/gitlab-dashboard
    environment:
      DATABASE_URL_FILE: /run/secrets/gitlab_dashboard_database_url
      RAILS_MASTER_KEY_FILE: /run/secrets/gitlab_dashboard_rails_master_key
    secrets:
      - gitlab_dashboard_database_url
      - gitlab_dashboard_rails_master_key
secrets:
  gitlab_dashboard_database_url:
    file: ../../secrets/gitlab_dashboard_database_url
  gitlab_dashboard_rails_master_key:
    file: ../../secrets/gitlab_dashboard_rails_master_key

The image's entrypoint, bin/with-file-env, loads the files before it runs the command, so this works for the default command and for overridden commands such as bin/jobs start. It works like this:

• It strips trailing newlines from the file contents, as $(cat file) does.
• It unsets NAME_FILE after it exports NAME.
• It exits with an error if both NAME and NAME_FILE are set, even to an empty string. Unset one of them instead of setting it to an empty value.
• It exits with an error if the file can't be read, including when NAME_FILE is empty, or if the file contains a NUL byte.
• Error messages name the variable and the path, but never the value.

The container runs as UID 1000, so make sure that user can read the secret files. Any variable that ends in _FILE follows this convention, so don't pass variables such as SSL_CERT_FILE to the container.

docker exec doesn't run the entrypoint. To load the secrets in a one-off command, run it through the wrapper:

docker exec -it <container> bin/with-file-env bin/rails console

Observability

This project includes OpenTelemetry instrumentation for distributed tracing, metrics, and logs correlation.

Quick Start (Local Development)

Start the full observability stack with Docker Compose:

docker compose up

This starts the application along with:

• Grafana: http://localhost:3001 (admin/admin)
• Prometheus: http://localhost:9090
• Tempo: Trace storage (accessed via Grafana)
• Loki: Log aggregation (accessed via Grafana)

A pre-configured Rails dashboard is automatically available in Grafana.

For detailed setup instructions, configuration options, and production deployment, see docs/observability.md.

For planned improvements and enhancement ideas, see docs/observability-roadmap.md.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please follow these steps:

1. Fork the repository.
2. Create a feature branch (git checkout -b feature-branch).
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add new feature').
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature-branch).
5. Open a Pull Request.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.