Using the GitLab API with 'glab'

I wanted to get a list of all of the GitLab projects of which I’m a member. Here’s how I used glab – GitLab’s CLI tool – to do that.

Log In

glab auth login

It asks whether to log into gitlab.com or a self-hosted instance; I picked gitlab.com.

Then it asks whether to use web-based or token-based login. I chose Token.

My personal access tokens had all expired, so I went to https://gitlab.com/-/profile/personal_access_tokens and created a new one. I called it glab, accepted the default expiration date (one month) and gave it api and read_repository scopes, as recommended by the CLI.

Note: I’ve managed with just read_api in the past, despite the recommendation. I guess it depends on what kinds of actions you’re planning on doing.

Copy the generated token from the web page and paste it into the glab prompt. The token is saved to the configuration file.

For the default git protocol, I chose SSH, since I’ve already got that set up and working. We’ll see if it breaks anything later.

Listing projects with glab repo list

If you run glab repo list, you’ll get a list of your repositories (i.e. the ones where you are an owner).

glab repo list --member lists the repositories where you are a member.

However, neither of these are particularly useful programmatically – the output is paginated and displayed in tabular form.

Listing projects with glab api

Instead, we can use glab api as follows:

glab api --paginate 'projects?membership=true&simple=true'

This spits out a bunch of JSON, which can be filtered by using jq. I also recommend redirecting it to a file, because it’s a bit slow and by using --paginate, we’re being kinda spammy with API requests:

glab api --paginate 'projects?membership=true&simple=true' > gitlab-projects.json

Then we can use it to (for example) clone all of the projects for which we are a member. Here’s a shell script that does that:

#!/bin/sh
jq < ./gitlab-projects.json -r \
    '.[] | select(.namespace.name == "my-namespace") |
        [.path_with_namespace, .ssh_url_to_repo] | @tsv' | \
while read -r path url ; do
    echo "$url -> $path"
    mkdir -p "$path"
    git clone "$url" "$path"
    sleep 2s        # go easy on the server
done