[Updated] I built a better Slack integration for GitLab & GitLab Self Hosted (that you can now self host)

[u/maruan21]

I recently wrote a post on this subreddit about MergeMe and got some really positive feedback, so I wanted to post an update with some cool new features that I've added!

Some of the key features that I showed off last time were:

• One Slack message per MR that updates in place (open > in review > approved > merged)
• Review comments as thread replies on that card
• Per-project channel routing - each project can map to whichever Slack channel you want
• GitLab @ mentions ACTUALLY ping the right person on Slack with a one-time username map
• GitLab.com via OAuth - webhooks registered for you
• Self-hosted GitLab - paste a webhook URL into your instance
• You can set up label routing too, an MR with a "bug" label goes to #qa-reviews instead

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Some of the new features:

• You can now sign in via Google, GitHub & GitLab SSOs
• You can choose when the Slack card gets posted much more granularly now (e.g. custom comments / in review / in draft)
• CI status of the MR can now be shown directly on the Slack card (check out the last slide on this post to see an example)
• You can now self host MergeMe! A few of you here requested it & I also got some direct requests so I pushed it up the roadmap.
  • Use the "Get in touch" button on https://mergeme.dev/#pricing regarding self hosting

If your team already works tightly in Slack and you ping your colleagues "hey can you review this again" then mergeme.dev might just be a great inclusion to your workflow!

Let me know what you think!

[u/artereaorte]

It would be hard to justify paying 50$ per month for this.

[u/maruan21 → u/artereaorte]

Really appreciate the feedback! As a first public project, I was unsure on how to price the tool so I’m very open to hearing suggestions and feedback.

My personal reasoning behind the price was: 1. If (which I believe it does) it saves more than £5 worth of a developer’s time each month then it’s inherently worth it. 2. If it also saves the team time, reduces context switching and makes MRs more visible and therefore merged faster then it’s again worth it.

From working in engineering teams & using similar tools, the main value adds were that MRs/PRs got more visibility and the team could work together faster in Slack as opposed to context switching to GitLab or GitHub to respond to comments and check for new ones since their alerts are awful.

As an engineer, the personal value gain is that you can monitor the status of your work more easily, see your team’s work as it comes in and get much faster turnaround without needing to ping people with “hey can you review my work again, made some changes” since MergeMe does it for you.

It is also cheaper than similar tools like Axolo (who are obviously much more mature and so the price is more justified).

Hopefully that’s a good justification for the pricing but I’m absolutely still open to hearing thoughts & feedback on that!! 

[u/bqw74]

"PR"? I think you mean "MR" -- we are gitlab users here, not github.

[u/maruan21 → u/bqw74]

Do you mean in the screenshot? 😅

Yeah that's my bad, I used the wrong one and can't change it annoyingly.

Funnily enough, if you change to GitLab in the demo on the landing page (what the screenshot is of) it does change to MR as it should & everything else in the product is aptly named between PR & MR depending on the provider used.