Can Gerrit work in front of Gitlab or is it meant to replace it

Question

I don't think I'm really understanding how Gerrit can fit into my group's existing workflow. Is Gerrit intended to be the central "hub" of code? I have been imagining it as similar to Atlassian's Crucible, which fits in with Atlassian's Stash or Bitbucker.

My group currently uses a very active Gitlab installation but the built-in code review facility is lacking, and I absolutely must inspect code from contractors going into the repo.

I need a behind-the-firewall solution, and cost is a big consideration. I have heard positive things about Gerrit, but not really an explanation of how it can fit into an existing process. I also like that it seems to have pretty good eclipse integration.

Can someone help me out?

Answer 1

Gerrit expects to "own" the repositories you use it with, i.e. it expects the git directories to be present in a mounted file system. If you want it to interact with GitLab (or GitHub) you can set up one way replication from Gerrit to GitLab so that changes made in Gerrit will be pushed to GitLab within a few seconds. For GitHub there's a Gerrit GitHub plugin to help with this.

You can continue to use the other features of GitLab but if you don't lock down the repositories (or at least block pushes into branches that Gerrit manages) you'll end up in trouble the next time Gerrit attempts to replicate to the GitLab repository.

So... Gerrit does replace GitLab's repository management and code review facilities but doesn't contain an issue tracker, wiki, or similar.